Ninefold and Rackspace Battle for Australian Startup Mind Space Last month American cloud computing service provider Rackspace, in an effort to expand its presence in the Australian market, announced a deal with early stage venture capitalists Pollenizer to offer Australian start-ups free hosting worth $2,000 a month for their first year of operations. Now, Rackspace’s Australian rival Ninefold has announced an identical scheme, also in partnership with Pollenizer and another incubator Starmate. While Rackspace’s offer had been introduced in the US much earlier as the Rackspace Startup Program (See: Why is Rackspace targeting Startups? ), it’s something new in Australia.
Rackspace Startup
Why is Rackspace targeting Startups? I have often spoken about how cloud computing can help level the playing field between established enterprises who can afford to spend millions on information technology (IT) infrastructure to support their operations, and smaller entities that cannot. (See: Fighting Above Your Weight Class Through Cloud Computing). Cloud computing, with its on-demand model that lets users pay for only that what they use, and the fact that it eliminates heavy setup costs, is a boon for smaller companies. At the same time, with its scalability, a small firm can grow and expand with the assurance that
More SMBs to Adopt Cloud in 2011 Popularity of Cloud Computing is increasing in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) (APAC) region and a newly released research conducted by AMI-Partners shows that Cloud Computing market for SMBs in this region will hit US$11.4B in 2011. Apparently, SMBs have recognized the tremendous opportunities offered by Cloud and are therefore decided to pump US$11.4 billion into cloud computing solutions. This year is set to a profitable year for solution vendors in APAC region as AMI forecasts the market for cloud solutions to grow at more than twice the rate of traditional ICT technologies. SMBs in
