South Africans can now experience and take advantage of Azure like services, with the announcement that Tarsus Cloud On Demand, will be offering customers the ability to tap into on-premise, off-premise as well as hybrid cloud features of the full Windows Azure Pack offering.

The Windows Azure Pack offering enables customers to leverage what is seen as Microsoft Azure-consistent experiences and services hosted in the Tarsus Cloud On Demand datacentre, which they purchase through a pay for what you use credit system. As part of its initial investment into the platform, Cloud On Demand is investing in over R2 million credits for customers to make use of, This will allow them to use the service at a discounted rate, deploy effective proof of concepts for their business as well as truly experience the value of the cloud without any initial capital outlay.

“The Windows Azure Pack services are the next evolution of local cloud and hosted services for South African customers. It enables customers to place a large chunk of their existing IT environment and datacentre management and services into the cloud,” states Jonathan Kropf, CEO at Tarsus Cloud On Demand. “Traditionally Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) has been the predominant offerings available to local companies.

“With Windows Azure Pack, we are now able to bring Platform as a Service (PaaS) to the market in an easy and cost effective manner. We believe in the value and are putting our money where our mouth is by providing cloud credits to the market,” adds Kropf.

The technology offering

The Windows Azure Pack is a collection of Microsoft Azure like technologies, providing Azure like services through a consistent user interface. It integrates with Windows Server, System Center, and SQL Server to offer a self-service portal and cloud services such as virtual machine hosting (IaaS), database as a services (DBaaS), scalable web app hosting (PaaS), and more. It offers a multi-tenant, self-service cloud that customers can put on top of their existing software and hardware investments, or which they can host at the Cloud On Demand data centre.

With the offering from Cloud On Demand, through the Windows Azure Pack Management Portal, customers can now leverage a full self-service user experience of their web sites and web platform application services (PaaS); their virtual machines by way of IaaS; Service Bus, for reliable messaging; Virtual Networks; as well as your database through SQL Server and MySQL database.

This links back into Microsoft’s own vision for “Cloud OS”, a hybrid cloud solution that helps enterprises transform their current infrastructure to deliver agility and cost effectiveness.  With Cloud OS, companies can quickly and flexibly build and manage modern applications across platforms, locations, and devices, unlock insights from volumes of existing and new data, and support user productivity wherever they are and on whatever device they choose.

The future of your cloud

“With the inclusion of the Windows Azure Pack to our already growing array of Cloud solutions and vendor offerings, we are providing our customers a hybrid solution that gives them the ability to define and leverage private clouds in their existing on-premises datacentre side-by-side with public cloud platforms, such as the Windows Azure Pack offering,” adds Kropf.

“What’s more, our Hybrid Cloud solution can also incorporate hosted clouds, supported by service providers that are part of our Cloud OS Network of partners.  We then leverage Microsoft’s own technology to provide a unified management toolset across all clouds – public, private and hybrid (hosted) – so that you have a consistent experience for provisioning, managing, monitoring, protecting and automating application workloads across all of the clouds that are part of your Hybrid Cloud strategy,” ends Kropf.

The Windows Azure Pack services are available to South African customers, partners as well as service providers, through Tarsus Cloud On Demand with immediate effect.Customers and partners can request Cloud credits by registering at www.azurepack.co.za.In addition, the company has a full expansion plan for its data centres throughout the rest of Africa over the next 6-12 months.

Tarsus Cloud On Demand customers will be able to view the full extent of the Windows Azure Pack features at its upcoming roadshow, to be hosted nationally on 18, 19 and 20 May 2015. The event, titled “Create better service businesses through automation and Cloud adoption" will demonstrate the company’s ability to deliver both the full Microsoft Windows Azure Pack as well as its integration with the AVG business solution stack.