With the acquisition of Blue Fire, Dimension Data is also adding Microsoft packaged workloads on top of that. The public cloud can be used for test and development, and as a proof of concept. Dimension Data is also marketing the ability to stand up an on-premise cloud, including hardware, software and installation, in eight to 12 weeks. He says this would otherwise take an enterprise six to 12 months to do in other cases.

"Where we've positioned IaaS, we're selling a resource pool that you buy on an hourly basis," says Jackson. "If you want to on the fly change compute, memory or storage, you can."

Gen-i's Ready Cloud brings a basic IaaS offering, out of a New Zealand datacentre, priced with SMBs in mind, according to Gerhard Nagele, Gen-i's business manager for IAAS and security.

"We have some large corporates down to the very small business that want to take advantage of the new cloud technology," says Nagele. "We will provide the cloud for them and we have the Pathway to the Cloud [Gen-i's consulting service] to work with the clients to transfer their current compute to the cloud so they can take over and do all their IT functions through a portal."