Kelway accuses rivals of cloak-and-dagger cloud strategy

Kelway has accused rival service providers of using irrelevant metrics as a smokescreen to blind customers evaluating contracted cloud services.

The London-based firm has lifted the covers off ServiceWorks, a bunch of standardised cloud services with a set price list, including Platform-as-a-Service compute, managed private exchange mail as well as backup services.

CTO Andy Eccles told The Reg many cloud providers were "hiding behind" traditional metrics – CPU usage, disk space, I/O and latency – when compiling reports on the monthly mean for uptime.

He said ServiceWorks will provide application-specific reports pertinent to the system "very shortly", adding: "From the summer, an online interface will allow users to see metrics [in] real time".

"In Backup, for example, customers will be able to see the duration of a back-up task, how effective it has been, and if there was an issue the file it relates to. Metrics [are] provided in a meaningful report," said Eccles.

The service will be hosted at Kelway's data centre in south London but can be replicated across its other three server farms.

Eccles expects 100 plus customers to migrate from its existing managed services by the end of the year.

The firm was not prepared to reveal the profit mix it currently derives from services. ®