The song “Down Under” from the album Business as Usual by Australian rock band Men at Work always thrills me. It has something unique about Australia, the land down under. I feel lucky to live in this beautiful land. Being an IBM Cloud Computing Ambassador from the land down under, it gives me pleasure to share great news which has the potential to change the cloud computing landscape in Australia.
Did you notice the album name? As an IT professional, I could not help making a joke by relating their album name to the commonplace IT term “BAU”.
Anyway, I do not want to digress from the main discussion topic of the post. Yesterday (October 24, 2012) marks an important day for the Australian Cloud Market as Big Blue launches its production grade managed public cloud offering, called IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+, hosted in IBM data center in Sydney. It was the first of the two exclusive Asia Pacific launch events held at Eureka Tower, Melbourne. There will be another event taking place in Sydney on the 25th October, 2012.
The speakers and executives who were present at the Melbourne launch event are:
Dean Evans, IBM A/NZ Cloud Computing Executive, Global Technology Services
Dean touched on why IBM Australia datacenter was chosen as the seventh IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ (SCE+) point of deployment and the first of its kind to serve IBM SCE+ in the Asia Pacific Region. He also discussed about the features and unique offerings of SCE+.
Some of the unique features of SCE+ in Australia include:
- Fully managed as part of the Global Deployment Model, and hosted onshore at the IBM Data Centre in Sydney
- A multi-tenant platform giving clients access to capacity on high end computing resources
- Flexible provisioning options of multi-platform compute capacity, like Wintel, Linux and AIX
- Designed to provide production/enterprise grade service with a choice of service level packages
- Full ITIL integrated cloud managed services
Virginie Haas, IBM Vice President, Global Cloud & Managed Services was present as a panelist for Q&A session.
Fausto Bernardini, IBM Director and Distinguished Engineer, Global Cloud Managed Service
Fausto discussed the IBM cloud global strategy for SCE+ and provided insights on global implementations to date.
Chris Morris, Associate Vice President for IDC Asia/Pacific Cloud Services and Computing
Chris presented IDC’s view on cloud computing and associated services trends in A/NZ and Asia Pacific and provided insights on future outlook.
For more information about SmartCloud Enterprise+, please visit IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ website.
Some of inhibitors to adopt cloud computing are security, data location and sovereignty issues, compatibility and interoperability, business continuity and disaster recovery, speed and latency problems in communication networks and the like. The launch of SCE+ hosted in a local datacenter will alleviate the concern of data residency for Australian companies. Thus it removes one of the barriers to cloud adoption in Australia. According to Longhaus’ 2012 study on Cloud IaaS market, IBM has been named as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) leader for a second and consecutive year in Australian IaaS market. Addition of this locally hosted SCE+ will help IBM not only retain its market position, but also play a significant role by helping Australian businesses in their cloud journey. Australian businesses can forget the headache of many legal and legislative issues by hosting the data within the country’s boundary. Also this enterprise grade, security-rich and reliable service will allow businesses to concentrate on their business goals while leaving the management of cloud enabled IT infrastructure in the safe hands of IBM. Let’s wait and see the positive impacts that SCE+ will have in the Australian market in the coming days.
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