Cloud Computing in Japan
KDDI is the second largest telecommunications company in Japan and offers a wide range of network-based services such as collocation and managed hosting. Just recently it has also ventured into cloud computing, offering IaaS cloud services based on a popular cloud infrastructure software provider. The Japanese telco selected 3tera mainly because of its superior GUI. This referred to 3Tera’s offerings that allow end users to directly provision resources while the company’s software dynamically scales the application infrastructure down as is necessary.
Provisioning and scalability is the core of user-level service in the cloud computing realm. Too many IT companies perceive the cloud as improved operations instead of treating it for exactly what it should be – a technology to allow end users and application groups to control their own infrastructure. The products developed by 3tera allow for user provisioning and KDDI believes that this is what they need for their offerings.
Another interesting thing about KDDI is the profile it created of the typical organization that uses cloud offering. In KDDI’s experience, companies are not really opting for the cloud to develop dynamically scalable applications. They perceive the infrastructure as a form of dynamically provisioned hosting. KDDI used the dynamic provisioning of RAC as a case scenario for its definition. To put it simply, enterprises still haven’t tapped into the cloud characteristics that KDDI’s cloud is going to offer.
But system integrators are currently on the KDDI cloud, using it as an infrastructure for cloud based apps. According to KDDI, SIs are using their cloud to develop SaaS applications.
