Agilisys offers cloud services with consultancy

UK services firm Agilisys is launching a managed cloud infrastructure service, intended to compete with the likes of Amazon and Rackspace by offering consultancy services to tailor the platform to meet a customer's exact requirements.

Agilisys Cloud Services, available from Monday, offers infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) from the company's UK-based datacentres, avoiding many of the privacy concerns that enterprise customers have had with US-based cloud providers due to issues such as the Patriot Act legislation.

However, Agilisys sees its chief differentiation in the market coming from the consultancy services and service level guarantees it can offer to customers.

"We're finding that not everyone is able to meet their needs with an off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all approach to cloud infrastructure," said David Cotterell, managing director of Agilisys Cloud Services.

Cotterell said that companies just dipping their toes into cloud computing need to be sure that they are heading in the right direction. Consequently, the firm is offering consultancy advice on their cloud readiness, and which of a customer's applications might be suitable for moving to the cloud.

Agilisys is starting by offering a lightly managed IaaS platform based on VMware technology with virtual machines principally hosted on HP Blade servers. However, the firm said it can take over as little or as much management responsibility as each customer needs.

The cloud solution most customers will get is private cloud – hosted in an Agilisys datacentre on dedicated hardware – but customers will have the option to "cloud burst" out to shared public cloud infrastructure if they find they need to expand.

Service level agreements are flexible, but based around a "four nines" availability level of 99.99 per cent uptime, the firm said, with credits offered to customers if the service fails to meet this level.

Agilisys is an established IT service provider in the UK, counting many public sector bodies in local government, central government and the health service among its clients.

The company declined to give specific pricing for its cloud services, but said it intends to be competitive against rivals such as Rackspace.