OnApp helps small public cloud firms take on AWS, Google and Microsoft

OnApp claims to have levelled the playing field for public cloud providers that want to go head-to-head with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft but lack the scale and geographical reach to do so.

The company offers cloud providers a means of selling on their unused compute and storage capacity to users across the world for app deployment purposes through an online marketplace.

Speaking to Computer Weekly, OnApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl said the marketplace allows providers to fulfil deals they may have previously had to forgo because they didn’t have datacentres in the locations users requested.

“If I was a service provider in Paris and someone came to me looking for infrastructure in London and I couldn’t provide it, I would lose the deal,” he said.

“With the marketplace, in that scenario, a service provider can click deploy and the customer would see two zones in their OnApp portal – one in Paris and a remote one in London.”

The service is underpinned by the OnApp Cloud Platform, the fourth iteration of which was recently unveiled by the company. Its arrival also marks the passing of the marketplace from beta to general availability.

The firm claims to have signed up providers in 25 countries that collectively own around 500 datacentres, which Bredahl claims dwarfs the number collectively operated by public cloud giants Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft and IBM.

“There are a few hosting companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM – out there that have locations around the world, but none of them have as many as we do. We have as many as all of those providers combined,” he said.

“It’s basically like an Uber, Airbnb, Just Eat and all those marketplace models you know, but for infrastructure. We like to say we are to Amazon what Airbnb is to Hilton. We’re screwing up their market.”

The model benefits smaller providers that are often able to compete with the larger players on a feature front, but lack the geographical reach and scale to win customers from them, added Bredahl.

For users, though, the marketplace also provides them with details about the featured providers’ uptime, their network throughput and even details of the input/output operations per second their storage infrastructure is able to process.

“For end users, it allows them to make an informed buying decision as they already have access to the quality score for the infrastructure before they buy,” said Bredahl. “So any key performance indicators you might want to know before you take your credit card out of your wallet, we serve to you.”