Published on the 01/10/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Canberra based start-up Buttonwood is putting the finishing touches to its cloud exchange platform designed to bring greater flexibility to hybrid cloud solutions…
Currently in beta with a couple of users, the Buttonwood platform is slated to go live in late October. According to managing director Allan King, the platform has been developed to offer enterprise users cloud choice, governance around their cloud deployments, and service consistency.
By using dashboards and clean user interfaces it’s possible to quantify cloud service consumption, by which departments (allowing costs to be apportioned at some stage) and also show how an organisation is tracking against its IT budget. The transparency – achieved by Buttonwood integrating its platform with the APIs of the cloud services it offers and those that its clients already have installed – allows IT managers to move processing loads around, making optimal use of both on premise and in cloud capabilities.
Buttonwood claims this can shave as much as 30 percent off IT bills.
Gartner’s most recent hype-cycle has hybrid cloud entering the famed “trough of disillusionment” territory – where user expectations are outweighed by reality. The analyst believes widespread deployment is probably two to five years off.
Undeterred King believes that hybrid solutions, where organisations have both on premise and cloud capacity deliver the greatest economy – at least for infrastructure.
“We work off a buy-the-base rent-the-peak strategy,” he said. The sweet spot for most enterprises was to use public cloud for 35 per cent of the time, with the remainder of infrastructure maintained in house according to King. That, he said, would let companies use cloud from say, 7am to 7pm for five days a week, which could support the needs of DevOps teams, but still maintain on premises equipment and capability to support off peak processing needs.
When Buttonwood launches on 28 October it will provide access to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services’ IaaS clouds. With a strong push to win Government business, the company is also planning to integrate with Dimension Data’s and Telstra’s cloud services.
It will also offer SaaS, initially in the form of Office 365, Google applications and Salesforce.
From early 2016 Buttonwood hopes to build up a channel of systems integrators that will be able to deploy the solution for customers. Ultimately the company hopes to take its solution overseas, though King acknowledged it would require an injection of capital ahead of overseas expansion.
King said the system had been developed so that when enterprises used the portal to dial up cloud services though would be offered the lowest cost competing bid that matched their needs. If the dashboard reveals that the enterprise is risking going over their budget, workloads can be brought back in house – which King said generally took less than an hour.
The company is presently working with Megaport and Equinex on a solution that will allow network bandwidth to support these relocations to be dialed up at will.
