Virgin Media Business launches its “first true cloud product” for UK firms

Virgin Media Business, the enterprise arm of the UK telecoms and media group, is launching itself into the cloud market, and today it has announced its “first true cloud product”.

The company says it’s attempting to “shake up the cloud computing market, with jargon-free advice, easy-to-use technology and straightforward support”, and its first product will be the Virtual Private Data Centre (VPDC), giving businesses virtual computing power, allowing them to test and develop applications without having to pay for hardware.

Powered by US-based Savvis, Virgin is looking to gain traction in an increasingly lucrative market. Virgin Media Business is making a direct challenge to its competitors, such as BT and Cable & Wireless, which it says have brought unnecessary confusion to the cloud.

The VPDC service will allow IT managers to gain virtual computing power by designing and deploying their own private data center. They can have it up and running the same day and the set-up can then be easily modified, with changes being ready to go within 90 minutes.

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Mark Heraghty, Virgin Media Business’ Managing Director, says that companies are “craving some clarity and no-nonsense advice”. He says:

“Providing easy-to-use, simple cloud services that do exactly what they say they’ll do, really well, is a breath of fresh air. Most are already signed up to the benefits of the cloud, but constant jargon and complicated advice have created a real barrier to entry”.

Virgin’s cloud service will also be backed up by the country’s largest nationwide fibre-optic network, and in conjunction with what it calls its “straightforward advice and support”, Heraghty believes it will gain a strong foothold in the market. He says:

“We’re already working with organisations across the UK that don’t want to be constrained by their IT systems, systems that are no longer able to respond to the rapidly changing world we now find ourselves in.  The dramatic rise in data volumes, the move to a remote workforce and the merging of business and consumer technology are all putting greater pressures on today’s businesses”.

Customers won’t be tied into minimum length contracts, and will be billed by the hour for however much “virtual power” they use.

A typical use case for such a service could be a company looking to take its first steps into e-commerce. Given that users only pay for how much server capacity they use, as a company’s traffic grows online, its available resources are automatically scaled up to cater for the demand.

You can read more about Virgin Media Business’ cloud services here.