Dan's Take

On-Premises Cloud-as-a-Service

HyperGrid touts HyperCloud's 'subscription economics.'

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 06/13/2017

HyperGrid just made a slightly overheated announcement of, in the company's words, "the industry's only fully managed service in an on-premises "pay as you use" pricing model."

The announcement also mentioned that HyperGrid has acquired XOcur, makers of a business intelligence Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for cloud decision making. The company also claimed that its HyperCloud is "the industry's first on-premises cloud as a service delivered with subscription economics."

Let's look at the elements of this complex release.

• HyperGrid is offering a new appliance server that can be placed on-premise in an enterprise data center, but HyperGrid, not the enterprise, will be responsible for managing it.
• HyperCloud offers application, platform and infrastructure services that it describes as a way "to accelerate transformation and delivery of business applications that drive innovation and competitive advantage."
• HyperCloud claims to provide a full scale- out application platform to your datacenter-as-a-service, delivering true cloud agility and economics inside your own datacenter.

The Key Points
I had the opportunity to ask a few questions about HyperGrid's goals for this product. Here I'll summarize the key points.

• It has all major services provided by leading public cloud both at the infrastructure  level and application/platform services level
• Business model and payment terms are exactly like leading public clouds: pay-as-you-use
•  Supports a mix of reserved instances, with fixed monthly payments and on-demand instances metered and billed on a per-hour basis
• Allows the customer to federate and centrally manage multiple hypercloud instances in different locations
• The appliance can be in the customer datacenter, but the infrastructure is still managed and monitored by the HyperGrid NOC
• Customer can bring any other private clouds or public clouds they are using under the central management of the HyperCloud portal, thus standardizing all the governance, policy management and self service capabilities across their HyperCloud instances and all other clouds
• There is no sharing of a given enterprise customer instance with other customers, unless a customer desires to do that (that is more of an MSP use case, which the company  also supports). An MSP that deploys HyperCloud can create secure multi-tenant pools of resources for their customers/tenants

HyperGrid's HyperCloud touches on many industry trends; and once what the company is really saying is teased out of the complex release, it appears innovative and quite interesting.

Dan's Take: Peering Through the Marketecture Reveals a Useful Product
When a company claims to be the first, it always raises red flags for me. With just a bit of searching, it seems that Dell, HPE, IBM and a few others can, and have, put together similar packages of products and services for its clients. Quite often their approach is based on deploying OpenStack or, perhaps, infrastructure software from Microsoft or VMware.

Enterprises interested in the "pay-as-you-go" pricing model, but for reasons of regulatory compliance, security or performance, require everything to reside in their own datacenters, might find this model and HyperGrid's products enticing.