Melbourne IT gives up on SMB cloud

Melbourne IT has told its small business customers that it is no longer interested in providing them infrastructure-as-a-service.

The company will decommission its vCloud Express beta service on July 1 and will only offer a commercial vCloud service to large enterprise and government clients.

The company sent a closure notice to smaller vCloud Express customers today, marked 'IMPORTANT', warning that after July 1 "all accounts will be closed and all data will be deleted permanently.

"All related data will be deleted and will not be recoverable," the notice stated.

"Please ensure you take the necessary steps to transfer any needed data from your vCloud Express beta instance as soon as possible.

"We will not be in a position to restore or recover your data after this date."

Melbourne IT chief technology officer Glenn Gore said that the company learned many lessons during the beta program, but wished only to offer a commercial IaaS product based on VMware's vCloud program, code-named "Redwood", to large customers.

Most of these, he said, had already made the transition to paid services.

Small businesses, by contrast, were not particularly interested in provisioning their own virtual servers - and in any case, the market for such customers was already dominated by large scale American offerings such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

"We will not immediately be offering an equivalent Cloud based service," Melbourne IT told its small business customers.

"Standard shared and dedicated hosted server options are available through WebCentral," the notice read.