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Ninefold gives up race against richer rivals

Users of Australian cloud face Christmas migration sprint after startup sends self TITSUP

Australian cloud outfit Ninefold has declared it has a total inability to support unlimited payments – TITSUP – and announced it is “sunsetting” itself.

That's not payment processing in our acronym by the way. It's payments for kit. Ninefold's death notice says “Significantly more investment is required if we are to make what we’ve built go to the next level.”

Which sounds an awful lot like code for “We can't compete with Amazon or Azure without spending a truckload of cash we just don't have and can't imagine we'll find anytime soon.”

Ninefold launched in 2011 with a developer-oriented public cloud offering, free deals for startups and a groovy demeanour deliberately at odds with that of parent company Macquarie Telecom.

The company was cheeky enough to find a way to offer early access to Windows Server 2012, one of many actions that helped build a reputation as a challenger to larger clouds.

That reputation, however, was built before Amazon Web Services and Azure splashed local bit barns onto Australian soil. Ninefold's not been as lippy since that happened and now we have an inkling as to why: it was struggling to keep up with larger and better-resourced rivals.

The death notice says “We will shortly notify our customers that we will be sunsetting our Public Cloud Computing (Server) platform, the last day of operation being January 30, 2016.

“Our minds are now focused on how we can best support a smooth transition for our customers to either our parent company’s cloud services or to an alternative provider,” the post continues. “We appreciate that for some of our customers this will be a significant inconvenience and we will do what we can to make it easy.”

Just under three months for a migration, with one of those months swallowed by Christmas and associated frippery, won't be easy for those with significant Ninefold entanglements. Nor, we imagine, will the job of winding up the outfit which as it points out was “the first Australian provider to invest in Aussie infrastructure that was truly cloud - multiple availability zones, instant horizontal and vertical scaling (at cloud capacities), purchased online by the hour.” ®

Boontote: Vulture South's predictions for 2015's IT headlines included a prediction titled “Australian cloud providers evaporate”.

Here's what we had to say back then:

“Those tier two ISPs and managed services outfits standing up wannabe AWS clones cobbled together out of bits of Xen, OpenStack and cable ties?”

Roadkill.

As the industry matures, smaller local players will find they can't make it pay and go away. The survivors will move into roles as resellers and managed services providers who make public cloud easier for those who don't like to get hands on with the big boys. This is happening already. By 2015 we'll see exits from the cloud caper.“

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