NEXTDC general manager of channels, Steve Martin.
NEXTDC is the first datacentre provider in the country to offer a pay-as-you-go co-location service.
The Brisbane-based company is Australia’s largest independent datacentre provider with five centres in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Perth.
It recently upgraded its earnings guidance for the current financial year.
The service is designed to enable low cost of entry to the co-location market for channel partners and their customers.
The FastStart co-location bundles are based on a pay-by-the month model.
NEXTDC chief executive, Craig Scroggie, said businesses were demanding Cloud-like flexibility from data centre services and that the new FastStart service fulfilled that need.
“FastStart radically accelerates speed-of-access to enterprise-grade co-location and our Cloud Centre ecosystem, giving customers the opportunity to hybridise their IT strategy with future flexibility.”
The provider is offering spaces from a 1kW quarter rack up to a 6kW full rack.
The firm said its FastStart service offered a co-location bundle supported by the same data centre infrastructure and customer services as traditionally purchased co-location.
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According to a company statement, the combination of customisable colocation and on-the-ground data centre expertise makes FastStart attractive for SMEs.
Specifically, the service is targeted at companies without their own expert tech staff; offshore organisations wanting to establish an Australian presence; organisations that are not certain of their upfront co-location requirements; or those needing to deploy IT infrastructure.
NEXTDC general manager of channels, Steve Martin, said the he believed there would be a move in the next few years for mid-sized to larger business to migrate around 15 per cent of their compute workloads to public Cloud.
He went on to say that the same organisations would look to move a further 35 per cent of total workload to private Clouds.
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“That’s a key customer transformation project," he said.
"That is where this FastStart co-location can play a role when they are looking to migrate their 50 per cent to the Cloud, but they still need a location for it.
"Whilst they are in that migration process it doesn’t make sense to put those racks under a longer term contract.”
Speaking of projections for the new service, Martin was hesitant to give a target figure for adoption of the service.
"It is a new concept and therefore there is no benchmark,” he said.
“Our goal is to bring a new group of organisations into leveraging data centres as a place where they can host their technology, but we also expect the vast majority of FastStart co-location partners and customers to convert to contracts three, six or twelve months down the track,” he said.
Martin was quick to emphasise that NEXTDC was offering its reseller partners the same types of margins with FastStart that they would expect when selling a traditional contract data centre rack.
It is this point that the firm believes will be most attractive to the reseller community.
