how global does a service have to be to be truly global?

One of the strange things when discussing cloud services with my customers is that the question of where the infrastructure is located very quickly comes up. One of the promises of cloud is to make geography irrelevant but, in reality, datacentre location will always be an issue for regulatory, latency/performance or just confidence reasons.

We have been providing multinationals with Business Together as a Service from our Paris datacentres for well over a year but prospective customers told us that they would prefer to have a regionalised approach to service provision. So, we have replicated the service platform around the world and announced this via a global webinar (replay here). If you make it through to the end, you should see a small version of some of our customers and me joining the event from Portugal.

We got a much bigger audience than expected for the event, we even had some challenges with the registration system to cope with the numbers joining - if you were one of these people, take a look at the replay and please accept our apologies.

We had our executives and technical team joining in from Moscow, Singapore, Atlanta, Frankfurt and Paris. Cisco joined us from their offices in Detroit, and I was with 16 of our customers at our user group meeting in Portugal on the end of a hotel internet connection, all using our own Open Videopresence service (nice to 'drink your own champagne') then streamed live to the internet. The sheer number of players and locations involved made for a challenging organisational task but we got through the session and, I hope, got the point across about how global this is.

There will be a number of posts about the event so I'll hold off from giving you a summary. Instead, take a look here where Katie has done a much better job than I could.

Now, here's my question: given that a high quality network can deliver the service to just about anywhere in the world, do we actually need to have all this investment in place before we can call a service 'global' ?

Peter

image © Sergey Nivens