BlueLock's cloud services aim at large and small

BlueLock, a little-known cloud-computing services provider, is rolling out a suite of services aimed at a wide range of customers, it announced Monday.

"One size cloud does not fit all," said Brian Wolff, vice president of sales and marketing for BlueLock. "I've got startups ranging to Fortune 500 banks on my infrastructure and those apps demand different classes of services and different tiers of clouds."

BlueLock has been offering many of the services in the packages but it is now offering them in four tiers designed to meet common needs.

On the low end is BlueLock vCloud Express. Test and development groups or startups can log in and start using the computing service online, with credit card billing for the usage.

The Virtual Cloud Professional tier is designed for businesses looking for a production environment that is hosted and managed by outside administrators.

BlueLock's Virtual Cloud Enterprise offering is targeted at businesses like financial services and government agencies that have strict compliance, disaster recovery and performance demands.

Finally, BlueLock's Virtual Private Cloud is a dedicated cloud offering that can be installed at a user's data center or at BlueLock's facility. It has dedicated capacity and security features but can offload burst loads to the BlueLock Cloud.

Wolff hopes that BlueLock's experience will help it attract customers in a market that is growing crowded with big names like Amazon and Microsoft. BlueLock launched in 2006, "before infrastructure as a service was well known," he said.

That experience helps set it apart, he said. In addition, BlueLock offers management services, which Wolff says also differentiates it from competitors. Many customers, if they used a competing service instead of BlueLock, would have to hire system administrators, network administrators or other infrastructure people to help manage their hosted projects. But BlueLock offers such services and can do so more cheaply than the companies could if they hired people internally, he said.

"I become their network administrator or system administrator so that frees them up to hire resources to write better code," he said.

Comparing price sheets, BlueLock looks more expensive than Amazon, he said. But that's because the management services are built into BlueLock's offerings, he said. Customers that must pay an internal person to do that work might find they spend more by using a competitor like Amazon, he said.

BlueLock hopes to add some other new features to its offering in the future. It's working on a feature that would let customers move from an unmanaged service to a managed service through a simple online from. "That is the ultimate goal, to make each platform seamless so you can move between the four," he said.

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