Rise, a division of U.K.-based Fasthosts Internet Ltd., has announced it has expanded its channel-focused cloud computing offerings for small to mid-sized businesses (SMB) in North America.

The company also announced its first U.S.-based channel partner, Titanium Ant.

Through Fasthosts, the U.K.'s largest web hosting company, Rise leverages more than a decade of experience delivering hosted services to businesses. The company has more than a million domains under management and hosts over 500,000 websites. Its massive, world-class infrastructure includes more than 8,000 dedicated servers offering more than five billion megabytes of storage.

Rise provides white label, infrastructure-as-a-service solutions to channel partners, enabling them to quickly add complementary cloud-based services to their portfolios for existing customers and to facilitate market expansion. Leveraging its Data Center-on-Demand philosophy, Rise enables partners to supply, manage and operate virtual data centers for customers in a secure environment.

Using the company's hosted infrastructure services, partners can provision a range of managed and unmanaged services, including e-mail, storage, back-up, e-commerce, and web hosting. Rise plans to expand its service offerings later this year.

In conjunction with announcing its market expansion into North America, Rise announced its first U.S.-based channel partner -- Titanium Ant. Titanium Ant offers a broad range of professional and IT services that enable small, mid-sized and large organizations to leverage enterprise technologies for business advantage.

Worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services topped $16 billion in 2009 and is expected to reach $55.5 billion by 2014, according to a research report released in June by IDC. Through its extensive product offerings, Rise enables channel resellers to address the growing demand and easily expand their IT services to include cloud computing, said Steve Holford, marketing director for Rise and Fasthosts.

"Rise was introduced to provide channel partners with a seamless way to offer cloud computing infrastructure solutions directly to small and mid-sized businesses," Holford said. "We see a true opportunity and growing demand for cloud computing in the SMB market as these companies begin to understand the real value cloud solutions can have on their business."

The Rise Channel Partner Program for value-added resellers and systems integrators includes technical support, sales and marketing support, and accreditation. SMBs regularly turn to trusted IT, web and telecommunications service providers when evaluating the right IT solutions for them. The Rise model enables channel partners to offer a wide range of IT solutions that best fit their SMB customers' needs, Holford said.

"By leveraging Rise's cloud infrastructure, we are able to further expand our IT solution offerings and quickly enter the cloud computing market," said Marshall Van Beurden, president of Titanium Ant. "In the past year, there has been increased interest surrounding cloud computing among our customers and potential customers. Rise enables us to address this growing interest and continue working directly with our customers to offer them the scalability, flexibility, and cost-effective benefits of cloud computing."