While the tech world is busy talking about the Cloud Computing with a focus on US, Singapore is quietly preparing itself for the Cloud Computing revolution. Singapore’s major telecom vendor, Singtel, along with grid computing vendor, Platform Computing, are offering Cloud infrastructure and applications solutions under the Alatum brand. Alatum offers these on-demand solutions to enterprises and public sector organizations so that they can tap into the cost effective Cloud Computing technologies.
In my post on Friday, debunking the idea of handful of Cloud Infrastructure players, I talked about how the needs and various regulatory issues in different countries will lead to a federated cloud ecosystem. I see this Alatum offerings as one such federated cloud player catering to the local and global markets from Singapore. Already, IT companies in India are anticipating a strong push towards Cloud Computing and I won’t be surprised if we see some movement on the infrastructure front from companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, etc.. India is still lagging behind on the infrastructure front but it is just a matter of time before they jump in with their own offerings. I am hearing some noises from Hong Kong and few other places in Asia where we can soon see some movements in this space.
Alatum offers two sets of offerings: one on infrastructure, for some strange reasons they are calling it as Platform as a Service offerings. There is not much information in their website but from what I could glean from their FAQ section, they offer a highly scalable infrastructure with some software to help the clients with management and deployment. It is not entirely clear if they offer a software development platform on top of it even though they mention some companies offering the same as technology partners. In the absence of any tangible information, I would term this as an IaaS offering. The other offering is on the application or SaaS side. Their SaaS offerings are from their technology partners ranging from accounting, finance, HR, Payroll, CRM, ERP, etc.. Since their website is incomplete, I cannot really say if it is some real SaaS application or the traditional applications hosted on their infrastructure instead of client datacenters.
I am still confused about what they mean by PaaS and SaaS but it is pretty clear that they are well positioned to offer Infrastructure as a Service to companies and government in Singapore. Their pricing model also reflects this thinking of mine. They offer a server based pricing structure much in tune with Rackspace or Gogrid and, also, a per CPU per hour based pricing plan. The server based pricing model starts at Singapore $ 500 for a single core 2 GB RAM to Singapore $ 4000 for 8 core, 16 GB RAM instances. There is no information on their site about the other pricing model but according to an Asia-Pacific telecom news site, the pricing for its High Performance Computing Plan is as follows
A second subscription option called, HPC (high-performance computing)is priced at S$0.51 per hour per CPU, and S$0.60 per 1GB of storage permonth. Both packages require subsequent fees for memory – as in RAM,and storage, as well as a one-time set up charge of S$500.
Here, at Cloud Ave, we are very keen on covering the Cloud Computing related news from many different countries. Some of us also believe that the Cloud market will not be dominated by one or two monopoly players. We are keen on learning about the Cloud Computing related moves from other parts of the world. If your company or any company you know from these regions are working on any project related to the Cloud, please contact us. We want to know about what is happening in different parts of the world. If anyone is interested in adding their thoughts about the Cloud Computing trends on the other side of the globe, we strongly encourage you to come forward and publish it as a guest post here.
