Macquarie Telecom subsidiary Ninefold is closing down in January, after five years of operation.

The public cloud computing provider says it is no longer accepting new customers and that ‘significantly more investment' would be required to take the operations to the next level.

“After an evaluation of the underlying technical platform, much consideration and deep reflection, we have decided not to embark on this journey,” Ninefold says.

“We will shortly notify our customers that we will be sunsetting our public cloud computing (server) platform, the last day of operation being January 30, 2016.

The company acknowledged that the closure ‘will be a significant inconvenience' for some customers and says it is focused on how it can best support a smooth transition to either Macquarie's cloud services, or an alternate provider.

The company launched in 2011 and was one of the first Australian providers to invest in Aussie infrastructure ‘that was truly cloud' with multiple availability zones, instant horizontal and vertical scaling at cloud capacities, purchased online by the hour.

News of Ninefold's imminent closure comes just a week after HP announced it will close its Helion public cloud offering in January and will instead focus on its private and managed cloud capabilities, looking to partners to provide any public cloud capabilities.