German giant T-Systems announced the launch of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), a service which is billed to take on Amazon's EC2, for free during the pilot phase.

The company stated that the service is based on x86 architecture that supports 32 bit and 64 bit OS and applications. The infrastructure makes CPU-intensive research projects or simulations possible at short notice without having to own the necessary hardware. These dynamic infrastructure services are billed on an hourly basis.

According to a report by Forrestor T-Systems pricing is not just close to Amazon's pricing of EC2 but could be lower than that. The report stated that while Amazon's EC2 service in Europe is priced at $0.095 per hour for a server with one core with 1.7 GB RAM, the beta version of T-Systems service is priced at 0.2 euros per hour. It further stated that T-Systems is due to further decrease the price below Amazon's pricing.

T-Systems' offering combine other services from its portfolio with its IaaS offering. It brings together the cloud approaches used in the public sector with those from the high-security business customer sector: Access controls, data security and protection, defined Service Level Agreements.

T-Systems operates information and communication technology (ICT) systems for multinational corporations and public sector institutions. The German Enterprise has an employee base of 45,300 and posted 8.8 billion euros in revenue in 2009.

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