Services rendered: how cloud suppliers differentiate themselves

As cloud vendors evolve they are trying to differentiate themselves by extending their offerings. But what customers want, and what they are prepared to pay more for, varies widely depending on the type of cloud service being used.

Telling the difference between types of cloud has never been easy. How many of us can look into the sky and identify a cirrus or stratus cloud, or explain how they become cirrocumulus or nimbostratus? Now the evolution of cloud computing is presenting similar challenges. As the IDC analyst Dave Bradshaw observes: ‘In order to survive, public cloud providers will become more like private cloud providers,’ as businesses want ‘more hand holding’ than vendors included in their initial public cloud offerings – particularly where Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is concerned. On-demand access and elasticity are all very well, but businesses are prepared to pay more for ‘services’ that relieve them of the burden of infrastructure management.

‘Businesses are looking to public cloud providers for the type of service level agreement [SLA] and support they currently get from private cloud providers,’ says Bradshaw, as they want a higher ‘comfort factor’ – and a transition does seem to be underway.

Rackspace, for example, has supplemented its on-demand cloud servers and services: wrapping them up with additional support and increased access to it, via two different levels of service – ‘managed’ and ‘intensive’ (as well as providing private clouds and hybrids and associated management services). "The first generation of our cloud did not have all of the service level capability we can offer today in ‘intensive’," says Lanham Napier, CEO and president with Rackspace Hosting.

‘We are increasing our capability so that customers can sleep at night knowing that their mission critical apps are healthy in the cloud,’ says Napier. He says Rackspace wants to be a ‘true partner’ to customers, which it aims to do by talking and listening to them more, helping them to identify and meet their business needs, and "being the one who gets the 2am call if something goes wrong" – and charging more for this. Rackspace charges from one pence (or $1.5 cents) per hour for on-demand access to a dynamically scalable Linux or Windows cloud server; add a managed service level, and you’ll also pay a monthly account management fee of £65($100), plus 10 pence (or $12 cents) per hour per server.