Bevan Slattery - Cloudscene founder and CEO
Partners and customers will soon have a new marketplace to buy and sell connectivity services thanks to a new marketplace initiative from data centre directory provider, Cloudscene.
The company, founded by NEXTDC, Superloop and Megaport founder, Bevan Slattery, is making its first move to monetise the platform by offering classified-style listings for connectivity services.
Slattery told ARN that the marketplace is a natural evolution of what started as personal data collection exercise.
"Cloudscene started as a spreadsheet so I could keep track of which providers were in which data centres around Australia, Asia and then the world,” he said. “A bit over two years later Cloudscene is the largest and most accurate independent carrier and data centre directory in the world.”
Set to launch in late July 2017, the site will focus on cloud and only offer services initially, but the company said it will look to add in hardware offerings if the platform is successful.
Buyers are able to create listings for free and the sellers will pay a $55 fee for a 14 day listing, the company said.
Cloudscene said there is currently no independent platform like this available and the marketplaces for datacentre providers like Equinix, Digital Reality and NEXTDC are closed systems.
“As we started getting more and more providers on our platform, we began to get questions from enterprises looking to buy services in many of the data centres,” Slattery added.
“People were asking us to introduce them to key contacts of these providers whether they were looking for transit, metro ethernet tails or international capacity. Initially we just kept introducing people to each other, but after a while we decided to build a solution and Cloudscene's Marketplace was born."
Now that the company is established, it is looking to expand its core offering to aggregation services and offer a platform for exchanges between buyers, sellers and other interested parties.
The company said that while these sort of discussions were happening through other organisations such as the Australian Network Operators Group (AusNOG).
“What we want to do is support those people as well so, when we see those queries we can offer them a place to find those services,” a company spokesperson said.
Personalisation to follow
The second phase of the project, which Cloudscene said would be available within one to two months of launch, will introduce a feature which will allow buyers to select which service providers they want to accept quotes from.
The system will then reach out to those providers and request a quote. In the initial stages, Cloudscene said this process will be manual to track response rates and quality. However, the company eventually wants to automate this process to improve efficiency.
Cloudscene said that while the marketplace does not officially go live until late July, buyers wanting to set up accounts can contact the company before launch to set up a profile.
