NXTcomm: Verizon Biz to Offer On-Demand Computing, Storage

Verizon Business in the first quarter of next year expects to launch on-demand computing and storage services delivered from five of its data centers, the company announced Monday at The Yankee Group Enterprise Executive Summit, which is colocated with NXTcomm.

The ability for business customers to turn up and down resources as needed and to pay for only what they use will dramatically lower their costs and enable Verizon Business to deliver these services within hours rather than days, said Christopher Gesell, director of global product marketing for IT solutions for Verizon Business.

After Verizon Business works with the customer to configure its services, that customer can access resources through a Web portal. Gesell noted the new on-demand capabilities will be billed based on metered usage and will allow customers to allocate expenditures by business unit.

There also will be SLAs, he added. To ensure that there are adequate resources on the network to support customer needs, Gesell said Verizon Business also spent a lot of time on inventory management related to its on-demand computing and storage offer.

The services will be available in virtual, dedicated virtual and physical options and there will be both production and standby/idle categories. They will be based on what Verizon Business calls its A.W.A.R.E. core technology at special data centers it owns in the United States, Frankfurt, Germany and Tokyo.

In addition to the infrastructure, software as a service/hosted applications also will be part of the service mix, said Gesell, who explained that Verizon Business expects to offer popular applications on the platform, which will employ both Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Gesell said Verizon Business expects early adopters of its on-demand platform to include industries with high levels of seasonality (e.g., CPAs), companies with disaster recovery applications, medium and large enterprise with large pools of non-mission-critical systems, and enterprises struggling to charge back business units for the IT resources they consume.

While “over-the-top” providers like Amazon and Google have gotten into hosted applications, which is being seen as a potential threat to the telcos, Gesell said Amazon doesn’t own the infrastructure, so it has no visibility into the network and thus can’t deliver SLAs. “It’s not enterprise-ready,” said Gesell of Amazon’s hosted offers.

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