The PC hardware manufacturer Acer is delving into new territories. The company has traditionally focused on hardware and not software, but now it is embarking into the world of cloud computing.
At Acer's BYOC Premiere Press Conference, which is being held in Taipei, Taiwan, the company has revealed it is partnering with NTI in bringing a private cloud platform to consumers and businesses. This platform is called build your own cloud, or BYOC as the conference is also named (not to be confused with BYOD, or bring your own device).
Users can use this platform to access their digital content anytime and anywhere through a connection that works between a PC and mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, the company says in a release.
"Businesses can use the platform to build multinetwork, cross-platform clouds supported by various devices and without significant overhead investments and time."
Acer has decided to partner with NTI due to NTI's more-than-20-year experience in software. NTI has worked with data backup, cloud storage, digital media and things related to Acer's BYOC.
"NTI has been a software supplier to Acer since 1999," says Bill Yao, NTI's president and CEO. "It's both an honor and our responsibility to be a member of Acer's BYOC alliance. We believe in Acer's strong vision, and we are very confident that our software expertise will help realize that vision."
Readers can check out various products and software NTI has available for purchase here. Readers can find out more about what Acer is doing with the cloud here.
As tablets continue to gain market share and traditional PCs are faltering in sales, Acer needs to adapt its business model to stay relevant. The cloud is certainly a step in the right direction.
It will be interesting how NTI and Acer work together on making this private cloud platform seamless and efficient for both consumers and businesses. It may be businesses that the companies should really target due to so many options already existing in the personal cloud space for consumers (ranging from Apple's iCloud to Google Drive to many others).
One thing both companies seem to be focusing on is PC or Windows products, and it seems both are a bit behind the times in terms of what operational systems they support in today's day of Windows 8, mobile OSes, OS X and Linux.
For instance, this NTI product's OS requirement description only lists Microsoft Windows 8, 7, Vista, or XP as the supported operating systems.
For Acer and NTI to really be able to tackle the modern consumer and business markets with a new cloud platform it certainly needs to be cross-device and cross-platform supported.
