The Manchester firm launched eCloud in June to provide the home-grown service and genuine elasticity demanded by UK businesses for years. Offering petabytes of high-quality storage, best-of-breed technology from 3Par, Cisco and SGI, and UK-based 24/7 award-winning support, it is the first cloud range of its type to hit the UK shores and has proved popular with UK firms who want to buy British.
Lawrence Jones, UKFast CEO said: “eCloud is attracting huge number of new clients to UKFast and has been incredibly well received. Its US counterparts run their clouds using free software and don’t specify hardware. It's difficult to understand where your data lives too as there are no clear boundaries where the US cloud lies.
“Businesses need transparency. They deserve to know where their data is and what technology it’s hosted on and that no one, not even the US government can access it. They deserve trusted, enterprise-level infrastructure. eCloud embraces the best of breed vendors, VMware, UCS and 3Par and it’s a massive investment but it’s paying off.
Jones added that eCloud’s success illustrates the industry demand for a top-class, enterprise-level cloud on home shores.
He said: “While we have seen an exceptional growth in cloud sales, Amazon has recently introduced a 50% reduction in prices. You have to ask if this is a knee-jerk reaction linked to the number of clients they are failing to keep but also to the growth of British providers, like UKFast.
“UK customers are getting tired of being kept in the dark and false promises about the whereabouts and guaranteed safe-keeping of their data.
“We didn't want to create a run-of-the-mill, self-serve cloud product. We wanted to combine great technology with the very best in British service. We wanted to bring something to Britain that businesses have been asking for for a long time.
“It demanded significant investment and months of research and development to create something that has never been seen before. It was worth it. We got it right, filling a gap in the cloud market for serious businesses that need top-spec technology and high levels of service, not just pay-as-you-go resources.”
Last year UKFast saw turnover increase by 25% to £20m. The latest figures driven by eCloud put the firm well on the way to hitting its projected 2013 target of more than £25m.