Amax takes the cloud to SMBs

Amax is taking aim at small and mid-sized businesses with a plug-and-play cloud appliance called CloudMax that offers pre-packaged, pre-integrated hardware and software designed to make the migration to cloud services easier and faster for smaller enterprises.

The developer of enterprise IT and cloud platforms has three business units—one focused on high-performance computing, one on OEM appliance manufacturing and one on enterprise solutions. This platform came out of the company’s experience in developing IT platforms for the enterprise.

“We’ve been working with SMBs for over 31 years,” said Jean Shih, president of Amax.

“Based on our engineering expertise, customer feedback and industry research, CloudMax was developed specifically for this market segment. The base CloudMax offering can easily scale up to any organization with 500 employees with the flexibility to grow as the company grows. We will be launching a large enterprise CloudMax solution shortly.”

The new CloudMax appliance is accessible to smaller enterprises because of how it speeds them into cloud services reliably and at a reasonable price point, Shih said.

“[CloudMax offers] maximum utilization of existing resources, automation of service delivery and minimize complexity and simplify Cloud deployment—all in a total ready-to-deploy, securing private cloud appliance starting at under $65k,” Shih said.

According to Shih, the new CloudMax appliance will help make small enterprises make a more efficient and seamless migration to the cloud.

“They’ll get a combination of automated management, network security and solid platform to transition from an internal IT infrastructure to a more productive and efficient private cloud infrastructure that is automated and supports multi-tier applications,” Shih said. Amax estimates that businesses can reduce capital costs by 75 percent and operating costs by 25 percent using CloudMax.

“Service levels are also improved, since resources can be dynamically added to higher-priority applications when needed, further reducing IT expenditures,” Shih said. “This decreases IT hours in integrating systems, provisioning and maintenance so SMBs can focus on staying agile and running their business.”

Shih acknowledged many small enterprises’ hesitance to date making a migration to cloud-based infrastructure and services, but said this approach addresses their primary concern: cost.

“With tier one private cloud appliance offerings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, cost has been a major barrier to adoption for SMBs,” Shih said. “Also, IT resources are constrained at this level. Most SMBs are doing more with less IT staff and resources. CloudMax is applicable to any enterprise customer that needs on-demand provisioning but are often unwilling to take the performance, security and risk drawbacks of moving applications to remote hardware in the public cloud that is not under their direct control.

“Private cloud is definitely on top of the SMBs wish list but from a priority and deployment standpoint they may not have the funds and resources to move to the cloud just yet,” Shih added. “This is their golden ticket.”