Alatum

Snapshot from www.alatum.com.sg taken on 30/10/08. Too bad there’s still no per second charging or some form of more utility like models, but it’s a start. All prices in SGD (1 USD ~= 1.4 SGD, 1 SGD ~= 2.3 MYR)

One time setup: $500 (this killed all potential developers, but serious young companies still ok)

For HPC (I’m positive software license is still not counted), $0.51/CPU Hr (pretty decent), $0.60/GB storage (not attractive – anyone building gmail drives?)

For commercial customers (read: CIOs who’s under pressure to cut cost…), monthly billing for $434 per CPU core, $25 per GB RAM, $6 per 10GB HDD, with discounts in bundles. Take the spec for 4 x Core (2.5 Ghz equivalent), 8 GB RAM, 40 GB HDD, punch it into www.dell.com.sg for a quad core 1U rack server (bigger disk at 160GB.. no 40GB HDD today) and minimum other things (e.g. 3 year next day on site service, no UPS) we’re easily talking about $3000. A co-location at a data centre in Singapore is easily $150/month with pathetic bandwidth. So a 3 year thing would be $3000 + $150 * 36 = $8400 and that’s the an impossibly cheap price for dropping all other charges. Nevertheless, compare to that of Alatum, which is offering a similar spec at $1760 per MONTH, a 3 year thing would be $63,000. Even if this model means saving you one engineer head count, say a fresh poly/ite kid at $2000/mo, which works out to be $72,000 over the 3 years, the $50,000 or so difference in pure equipment cost and a managed service still does not gel well with many young companies.

Also, a shared 10 Mbps network hardly make sense for a 300 server grid – maybe everyone’s waiting for NGNBN *wink* this means the grid is only useful for compute intensive stuff as storage and network is not attractive. The lack of scale means that the offering still looks very much like the traditional dedicated servers which has already been around for some time. Everyday, I see young companies asking where should they host their very first instance of their intellectual property and the first place chosen is the US. We always forget that one of these smallest companies who would eventually anchor the infrastructure and show case its capability when it has to scale. Think Animoto on EC2.

So it is no wonder when AMI Partners came over and said: SaaS adoption for medium/large companies is taking off, well of course – the barrier of entry for younger companies is still too high! *grin*

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