Thursday, January 13, 2011

Amazon raises the bar and lowers the cost

As the public cloud space becomes an arena for competition, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing pioneer, has set the standard even higher.

With its enhanced range of support offerings and cost cuts on some plans, AWS is keeping its grip firmly on the cloud. There are two new support plans – Bronze and Platinum – the former for individual developers and the latter aimed at enterprise customers. In the AWS blog, Jeff Barr (AWS ‘evangelist’) described the Platinum offering as going “above and beyond the Gold plan.”

Gold and Silver have not been forgotten – with a 50% reduction in the usage based pricing, customers should be kept happy.

Barr explained the beauty of the Platinum support plan. “We will assign a named technical account manager to your account, and your tickets will receive 'white-glove' routing, jumping ahead of queued tickets entered at the other levels," he added. "We will respond to critical tickets within 15 minutes, and urgent tickets within an hour."

The Platinum customer gets, what appears to be, regular one-to-one guidance from the account manager in a regular analysis of usage and performance. A team of AWS solution architects will be available for help where complex implementations are concerned.

AWS obviously want to stand out in the cloud – and encourage more companies to join up. With the rivals lining up, such as Rackspace, AWS have made a move that keeps them as strong cloud contenders.

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