Blue sky thinking?
- Article 3 of 15
- EducationInvestor, July 2011
Is there money in cloud computing?
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Frank Joshi, managing director of Mvine, which provides cloud services to Bath University and the London Business School, agrees that green computing and competition for students is causing universities to look to cloud providers to help. “Bath is looking forward – fees are higher and they’re going to have to go out to market with a new proposition. There’s a build up of requirements and a greater appetite for technology among students. That’s a strategy we’re helping them with around student placement and engagement.” Mvine has taken over some existing services and added others, including updating their data warehouses and providing better portal management. Any new services that Bath wants can quickly be developed and deployed in just a few weeks and existing services can be iteratively improved equally quickly, something that would be hard or impossible using Bath’s inhouse expertise and hosting.
By hosting the services, Mvine has helped Bath with another of its priorities – reducing its carbon footprint – something it’s also doing through a cloud project that manages Bath’s lighting system remotely. Mvine’s revenues: from £2-3k to £20-30k per month, depending on what services its clients want.
It’s still early days for cloud. But with pan-European HE cloud standards seeing little interest from the larger cloud providers, it’s likely that both in the long-term and short-term specialist services are going to be the biggest areas where private companies are going to find both opportunities and profits.
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