Colt Teams Up With Tibco For New Cloud Service

Business communications provider Colt is using cloud software from Tibco in order to offer enterprises a new cloud solution.

Colt is touting the new offerings as both a Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution for cloud services, and is targeting it at organisations that use applications in high performance computing environments.

According to Colt, the Managed Grid Service (PaaS) will provide a flexible but dedicated infrastructure for customers to power applications running in high performance computing environments. Customers will be able to set business metrics against their applications, and if they opt to implement dynamic infrastructure resourcing, they can scale the application to meet those metrics.

The Grid Extension (IaaS) meanwhile is aimed at securely expanding existing infrastructures by allowing a large number of resources to be attached, using COLT private network connection.

“We first launched an enterprise cloud service back in July 2009,” said Steve Hughes, cloud and virtualisation specialist, Colt Managed Services, speaking to eWEEK Europe. “This was Managed Workspace SaaS (software as a service), based on MS Office being offered as a virtualised desktop. We already have several 1,000 customers in Europe on this service.”

Hughes also said that last month Colt had announced the availability of its Cloud Infrastructure Services, which provides a dedicated server and software, and which already has 20 customers using it.

“Today’s announcement that we are working closely with Tibco means it can be implemented in two ways. One is a grid (i.e. compute intensive resource shared across multiple sources) server software for financial services,” said Hughes. “The other element is the fabric server product, which brings intelligent and rules-based management to cloud infrastructure. It is a managed application service – we manage to a SLA (service level agreement) with a customer, based on the number of concurrent users, and we can scale in the infrastructrue to meet those SLAs.”

“This is suited for large installations, with thousands of cores looking to run computing intensive tasks,” said Hughes. “It is hosted from Colt’s data centres – we have 19 data centres throughout Europe, which has the added advantage of helping to meets customer requirements and their regulatory obligations.”

“We are very excited to be doing this with Colt,” said Ram Menon, executive vice president of orldwide marketing at TIBCO Software. “One of the key differences, especially with financial services and all those regulatory issues, is about where the data is located and the ability to provide trust. Our ability to provide trust in early stage adoption of the cloud is very important,” Menon told eWEEK Europe.

“It is the right offering at the right time, as people are looking carefully at their data centre investments, as people sometimes require, at certain times of the day, extra computing power,” Menon said. “This offers computing power on demand.”

“Data Synapse has large footprint in the financial services sector, so it is natural for Colt to build a relationship with Tibco because of our financial bent,” added Hughes. He explained the offering will be available in a couple of months (Q2 2010) and that Colt has “already engaged with customers.”