Vendors of various virtualised cloud services are seeing revenue growth rates of up to 27% for some of their service lines against the market norm for traditional hosting services in EMEA of around 8%, according to intelligence shared with CBR by BT.
“Across EMEA the market will reach £11 billion this year, and it has been estimated that it will touch £12 billion in 2010,” Steve Holt, General Manager for IT Services at BT Global Services told us. “Of this, around £7 billions worth of the business can be associated with the provision of traditional hosting services.”
Of the remainder, Holt said that the supply of virtualisation services, which was seeing growth rates of around 17%, added up to around £1 billion.
The market for hosted managed application services is around the same size, but is estimated to be growing at a rate of 12%.
In contrast, infrastructure-as-a-service offers, which are currently producing revenues for service vendors of around £300 million, are expected to grow by as much as 27%.
BT claims to be one of the first movers in Europe with its infrastructure-as-a-service proposition to SMB and enterprise customers, and has already announced its intentions to develop out its Virtual Data Centre (VDC) service. This provides a virtualised infrastructure platform for businesses that enables them to consume IT and networking infrastructure as a service, and which could form the base for future cloud services.
Holt said the company already manages 1,500 customer platforms using assets held in 38 data centres, and is developing its interests across EMEA.
“We have acquired 19 companies in the last three years and today run around 13,000 servers for external customers. Between 60% and 70% of our business is outside of the domestic UK market.”
This line of business sits outside the traditional outsourcing service contracts BT has in place, and takes in managed services for web and application hosting, co-location and managed infrastructure.
Holt said the company was making good inroads in the market as a provider of infrastructure-as-a-service.
“It is part of the legacy of BT, we’re good at managing infrastructure from MPLS and the virtualised network to running shared blades in a data centre, and we have invested in the development of virtualised enterprise-class components. We have Cisco for the data centre fabric, routers and firewalls, NetApp for data storage, HP providing the blade architecture, all of which is set up to be able to offer pay-as-you-go services.”
Servers, storage, networks and security can be orchestrated and automatically provisioned through BT’s online portal. Customers can change the infrastructure in real-time throughout the duration of the contract through the portal.
“BT VDC delivers to large organisations the benefits of enterprise class cloud computing to customers at a significant saving against a standard hosted infrastructure deployment,” the company said.
Holt added that features like global load balancing and the ability to manage disaster recovery across data centre loads are designed to appeal to large enterprises, and that an increasing numbers of applications were being prepared to be delivered as a service on top of the VDC platform.
