Zürich, Thursday 21 April 2011 – CloudSigma AG, the public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider based in Switzerland announces its partnership with Strategic Blue, a specialist cloud brokerage and billing company providing tailored purchasing and payment solutions.

Through Strategic Blue, CloudSigma's customers can gain favourable payment terms and prices designed to reflect their particular usage profile and needs. This is achieved through the advanced consolidation and management as a portfolio of multiple cloud purchases by Strategic Blue.

Patrick Baillie, CEO and co-founder of CloudSigma commented “We are very excited about being able to offer customers tailored, favourable billing terms through Strategic Blue. They will offer significantly better terms than can be achieved by purchasing directly for many of our customers. Their services are an ideal fit for the increasing number of enterprise class customers that we see migrating to our cloud.”

Customer Driven Solutions
The new partnership extends CloudSigma's existing commitment to giving maximum control and flexibility to customers. Now customers of CloudSigma can choose to interface directly or through Strategic Blue for their cloud billing arrangements, depending on their preference. The partnership will complement the pre-pay billing model available directly from CloudSigma with invoice payment terms available through Strategic Blue.

James Mitchell, CEO and founder of Strategic Blue commented, “We consulted with our customers over CloudSigma's approach to IaaS, and found enormous demand for the technical flexibility and support that they offer, together with their remarkably low data transfer costs. Purchasing through Strategic Blue, customers can now gain access to that flexibility under payment terms tailored for their particular requirements.”.

Moving to a Multi-Cloud Model
CloudSigma has a strong commitment to open, flexible cloud computing with a strong emphasis on eliminating vendor and data lock-in. This is reflected in the open software and networking layers of the cloud plus the simple data migration tools available. As part of this, CloudSigma encourages multi-vendor cloud infrastructure deployment models that can extend a very high degree of computing independence to customers.

Billing has historically been an area of friction between cloud vendors and cloud users, however Strategic Blue's solution transforms multi-cloud infrastructure deployment from a potentially complicated management issue to a simple billing relationship with one party, Strategic Blue.

Patrick Baillie continued, “We have always felt that billing represented a challenge to customers deploying on multiple clouds. Strategic Blue offers our customers a very elegant solution – a single bill, but with direct technical access to each cloud vendor.”

Strategic Blue's favourable payment terms and prices are currently available to all existing and future customers of CloudSigma's cloud. Both European and upcoming US locations will be covered by the new partnership.