Australian managed cloud services provider Bulletproof has today unveiled On Demand, the first Amazon Web Services (AWS) pay-as-you-go support solution in the country.
On Demand will be available starting this month, and will incorporate 24-hour customer support, including assistance within 15 minutes for critical issues.
"Customers who use Bulletproof's On Demand will instantly have access to Bulletproof's 24/7 world-class support specialists, but only pay for the support time they use," said Bulletproof director of sales and marketing Mark Randall, who recently joined Bulletproof after leaving his role as general manager of Rackspace Australia.
On Demand will have no fixed or ongoing costs, employing an as-a-service model.
"While we have in-house capabilities to manage our eCommerce platform day-to-day, we need additional technical help from time to time, said Jase Clamp, ecommerce manager of Madison Technologies, which has been trialling the offering for the last month.
"Being able to dip in and out of Bulletproof's On Demand support provides us with a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective model."
Founded in 2000, Bulletproof first aligned with AWS in 2012 to offer a managed cloud service.
"More than AU$1.5 billion of ecommerce revenue is transacted by Bulletproof's clients," said Randall.
Bulletproof announced its financial results in August, reporting that its revenue had grown by 46 percent in the 2013 financial year.
Yesterday, IBM director of Cloud Business Justin Gatlin said at a media and analyst briefing prior to the company's InterConnect 2013 event in Singapore that businesses looking to move to the cloud aren't focused on financial reasons.
"It's not about cost reduction. That's not how the conversations go," he on Wednesday.
"It's about empowerment. How we empower business users, align the business, how we empower the IT users, and how we empower the customers."
Last month, a Forrester study commissioned by datacentre provider Equinix, had similar conclusions when it revealed that the financial benefits of pay-per-use computing were rated the lowest in a survey of 112 IT decision makers across four countries.
"I think many cloud providers have overestimated the perceived value of two things: Not only the financials, the shift from capex to opex over the near term, but also the importance and perceived value of pay per use and chargeback, and enabling that within the organisation," Forrester Research vice president and research director Michael Barnes told ZDNet at the time.
"It's not like this has anything necessarily to do with cloud, per se," he said.
"Folks have been trying to improve their ability to monitor usage and do some type of chargeback facility for decades — it's not new."
AWS yesterday announced that it is rolling out Glacier and Redshift to its Sydney datacentre, and revealed the Australian pricing for the services.
Both Glacier, which targets archiving and backup workloads, and Redshift, an analytics service for large datasets, become incrementally more expensive with each increasing data allowance when compared to the pricing in the US, with both services almost reaching triple the cost in Australia.
AWS has 14,000 customers across Australia and New Zealand, including Atlassian, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, MYOB, and Halfbrick Studios.