While Microsoft office 2010 is directly targeting developers, who might service enterprises or SMBs, Fujitsu has its eye directly on the enterprise market.
Each company must negotiate with Fujitsu for the service. "It's very much an enterprise market and it's not a price-book type advertisement we're going for."
Other companies providing similar cloud products hosted in Australian datacentres are Melbourne IT (its product, based on VMware's vCloud Express, is still in beta), Ultra Serve-subsidiary Rejila and Canberra-based Cloud Central. They all provide their pricing upfront, which Fujitsu said shows that they are after smaller companies.
We see it as a different market because your sign-up method is through credit card. The customers that we'll bring on with [our offering] will be customers who are verified by Fujitsu and then come into an enterprise-ready cloud," McNaught says. His definition of enterprise-ready is having high availability, security and dual datacentres providing the service. office 2007 download cloud availability is advertised as 99.999 per cent.
Yet Fujitsu's model didn't impress Cloud Central's founder Kristoffer Sheather. "I think that model's old-fashioned really. The new way of doing things is low friction. The pricing's out in the open. Everyone knows what everyone else is getting and you can actually sign up to the services very rapidly. Cloud should be about getting on board rapidly. If you have to go through a negotiation process that sort of takes the nature of cloud away. I'd sort of question how cloudy that really is," he says.
Cloud Central's uptime is 99.9 per cent, although customers can negotiate higher availability. Sheather's customers are small- and medium-size enterprises at this point. He is also looking to expand into local government.
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