Bulletproof wins $1.5m trio of deals

Enterprise hosting company Bulletproof Networks has signed up a trio of deals worth $1.5 million, awarded contracts to run Borders' eBook store, the AGIMO's eGov blog and the Movember charity campaign.

All three deals involved the provision of what Bulletproof calls "managed cloud" hosting - the use of a highly virtualised, shared pool of IT infrastructure running on VMware software.

The company offered enterprise Service Level Agreements (SLA's) for services hosted on this shared stack.

Bulletproof COO Lorenzo Modesto told iTnews that the service could cope with extreme peaks and troughs in terms of user demand.

The Borders eBook store, launched in May 2010, offered over one million downloadable books and magazines for eReaders such as the Kobo.

Modesto said the Borders site had "grown significantly" since the eBook store launch and would scale up during the lead up to peak retail events such as Mothers' Day, Fathers' Day and Christmas.

Bulletproof will also run the website for the Movember campaign for the fourth year running. During Movember (ie November), volunteers grew a moustache to raise money for prostate cancer research and resources to cope with depression.

In 2009, the event received 250,000 registrations and raised over $43 million. Over the course of the campaign the site went from using an off-peak farm of two servers to scale to using over 40 servers.

The infrastructure required for the Federal Department of Finance and Deregulation's foray into blogging will also start small, but boasts the potential to scale into the future.

Modesto said the emphasis for the AGIMO (Australian Government Information Management Office) blog - now hosted by Bulletproof - was on "availability and scalability."

"If you look at the way that this kind of infrastructure will be delivered in ten years, I don't think it's going to be on old-style physical infrastructure but rather it will allow the customer to be completely divorced from the infrastructure - that's the ultimate promise of the cloud," he said.

"This is essentially what Bulletproof is delivering, but with a management wrapper to allow customers to really leverage it for cost effective, fault-tolerant application delivery."