DiData to push Microsoft cloud in Australia

Dimension Data has launched a private cloud service supporting the Microsoft Cloud Platform and announced its plans to quadruple its data centre business in the next five years.

The new product, "Private Cloud with Hyper-V", allows clients to develop and host Microsoft applications in a dedicated cloud.

The announcement was issued from Dimension Data's US headquarters but CRN has confirmed with Australian cloud services GM David Hanrahan that the product is ready for local customers.

"The local availability means we can provide lower latency and meet data sovereignty needs," Hanrahan said.

The Microsoft Cloud Platform is built on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack and the new cloud service supports hybrid 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Red Hat Linux environments.

"By empowering our private cloud with Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V, we're combining Microsoft solutions with our consulting, integration and management services to provide our clients a full lifecycle of solutions for their Microsoft infrastructure," said Steve Nola, head of Dimension Data's IT-as-a-Service group.

"Dimension Data clients will be able to move Microsoft workloads between their on-premise, Microsoft Azure and Dimension Data cloud environments."

The new offering comes on top of Dimension Data's declaration that it plans to aggressively grow its data centre business to US$4 billion in the next five years – four times its current data centre operations.

"Although all our markets are targeting exponential growth, our analysis shows there’ll be higher rates of growth in mature regions such as Europe and North America, given the legacy data centre investments in those geographies that require transformation," said Steve Joubert, group executive for the data centre business unit.

The growth will be achieved both "organically and through acquisition", according to a company statement. Dimension Data currently has 12 cloud locations globally, although that number increases with partner involvement.

"There are now 25 data centres in total including OneCloud partner cloud platforms – this equates to significant buying power," Hanrahan told CRN.

Cloud offerings from Dimension Data have increasingly been purchased by other integrators to be on-sold to end customers. Hanrahan sees this as a fruitful strategy to grow its channel and economies of scale.

"Our OneCloud program allows service providers to white label and this gives us global scale," Hanrahan said. "Grow the channel and you grow the scale."

Asked if there has been any impact of Dimension Data's recent sale of distie Express Data, Hanrahan said that there has been no day-to-day impact on cloud operations.

"The relationship with Express Data as our supplier continues as previously – there's been no impact to clients," said Hanrahan.