VDC named best Cloud / SaaS Product at TechWorld Awards

Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre (VDC), the first truly integrated Infrastructure as a Service offering available to the European market, was named the Cloud / SaaS Product of the Year at last night’s annual TechWorld Awards.

Launched in late 2011, Claranet’s VDC enables users to self-provision their own infrastructure resources at the click-of-a-mouse and is designed to meet the demands of the modern enterprise and mid-sized businesses. Award organisers were particularly impressed by the service’s hypervisor agnosticism, which has been key to its appeal with analysts and customers alike.

Claranet believes that the hypervisor market will become increasingly competitive over the coming months and years, with more challengers to VMware’s current dominance. To address worries about ease of migration from one virtualised environment to another, VDC features a software orchestration layer, which makes the service hypervisor-agnostic.

Michel Robert, Claranet’s UK Managing Director, said: “This latest win is a significant achievement for Claranet, and comes as solid recognition of the skill and expertise of our product and technical teams. The TechWorld Awards are held in high esteem by the industry, for the pedigree of the judging panel, which consists of journalists, analysts and our industry peers..

“We needed a service that offered real differentiation from other players. VDC was designed in response to rigorous independent research commissioned by Claranet into the adoption and concerns held by IT decision makers about migrating to a cloud service. The research found that the top three barriers to adoption were the reliability of the service, data security / data sovereignty, and ease of migration.

“By listening to the market’s concerns, we decided to build a service that featured integrated networking, a hypervisor-agnostic platform, hosted exclusively in-country data centres - addressing the three key concerns amongst users, of reliability, data sovereignty and ease of migration.”

One of the VDC service’s key differentiators, and one that addresses the core issue of reliability, is that it is integrated with Claranet’s own MPLS network said Robert: “Users don’t need to touch the public internet when connecting to the service, making it significantly more secure than other services that lack network integration. This also ensures end-to-end accountability for the availability of the service as a whole, and a single point-of-contact for all service queries.

“It’s a very busy marketplace and a hotly contested category, so to be named best Cloud / SaaS Product of the Year is an enormous achievement and a huge vote of confidence in the service,” he concluded.

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