Phoenix goes PaaS

The trend towards service aggregation is starting to gather some pace now, as the recent announcement from IT services and support provider, Phoenix, indicates. Though more widely known as a provider of day-to-day outsourced support and management services for the IT resources of major enterprises, which has given it a good foothold in the world of cloud services and making them work, it is now taking the plunge into packaging services into a range of PaaS offerings, collectively known as CloudSure UK.   

These are off-the-shelf, enterprise class infrastructure packages that delivers IT resources as a service.  As an HP CloudAgile partner, Phoenix has based the infrastructure on HP’s Converged Cloud technology, which Phoenix says combines the economies of scale of a public cloud with the flexibility, security and resiliency of a private cloud.

As the name implies, the platform packages have been developed to attract the interest of UK-centric, mid-sized enterprises. They have been developed to reflect the evolution of cloud computing into mainstream adoption, and include the elements of a cloud offering which have most often been requested by existing Phoenix customers, with the aim of creating off-the-shelf, ready-to-go solutions. 

“CloudSure UK caters for the needs of the majority of mid and upper-midmarket organisations”, states Tim Bodill, Sales Director for Managed Services and Cloud at Phoenix. “It provides the ultimate in flexible, scalable hosting with a secure, virtualised environment that delivers IT resources as-a-service including servers, storage, memory, software licensing and bandwidth.”

There are five core packages, based on the number of users a customer needs to service. The first is for up to a hundred users and the larger package caters for a thousand plus users.  Within the packages, customers have the flexibility to choose from operating systems, directory services, file and print services, database and mail services to suit their particular needs. 

HP Cloud Service Automation enables Phoenix to provision complex infrastructure and applications quickly, reducing the time it takes to bring services to market.  The HP CloudAgile Program gives Phoenix access to HP’s sales force, cloud technology roadmaps and go-to-market support to expand its portfolio of service offerings, accelerate launch of services and acquire new customers.