Published on the 01/10/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Ninefold, the Macquarie Telecom owned cloud services provider, has launched a platform-as-a-service offering for Ruby on Rails developers and kicked off a major push into the US market…
Established in 2011 as an infrastructure as a service provider targeting the Australian start up community, Ninefold has developed global ambitions to become a platform-as-a-service provider.
Ninefold chairman Peter James, speaking to iStart from San Francisco on the eve of the company launching its platform-as-a-service offering for the US-based Ruby on Rails development community, said that while the infrastructure-as-a-services business would continue – the main global game would be on platform-as-a-service. It started offering the Ruby on Rails platform-as-a-service for Australian customers earlier this month.
The company, which has operated out of Macquarie Telecom data centres in Australia inked a deal last year with a San Jose-based data centre which is hosting Ninefold infrastructure allowing it to offer the platform-as-a-service system with reduced latency. James said that a second data centre, probably in Virginia, would be signed up shortly to provide East and West coast centres with US-based failover. Europe is next on the global expansion list.
James said that given Ruby on Rails was the world’s leading open source development language, by providing a platform specifically for this community it would be possible for Ninefold to attract business from global start ups that want to spin up an app quickly, or use a third party platform to run large production apps. Ninefold is offering a month’s free trial of the platform to would-be users.
Unlike the broader cloud infrastructure services that Ninefold originally offered (and will continue to provide) the Ruby on Rails platform is part of an “inch wide and mile deep strategy” according to James that will allow it to break into global markets.
“The original Ninefold is quite well established – but we have decided that the platform-as-a-service is the place to go.”
James, who has been regularly commuting to the US throughout the year, said Ninefold had people on the ground in the US and would be moving into shared office accommodation shortly as it ramps up its US push.
