Canberra Data Centres nabs HPE Helion boss for partner push

Canberra Data Centres has launched a partner ecosystem to connect IT service providers with public sector buyers in the nation's capital.

CDC has also hired Matt Holden, who left his role as general manager cloud at Hewlett Packard Enterprise to become the co-location provider's partnership director on 1 July.

Holden will oversee the GovSky ecosystem, which seeks to bring together government agencies with IT solution providers, including resellers, system integrators, MSPs and independent software vendors.

CDC provides the underlying data centre environment to host services and applications targeting the highly regulated public sector – and the company can also open the door to government agencies. IT suppliers will be able to leverage CDC's trusted role in federal government to get their solutions in front of customers.

Holden said government IT projects typically require products and services from multiple suppliers, and GovSky is a way to facilitate joint discussions between multiple suppliers and customers.

"We are finding people are having half the discussion or only a piece of the discussion. By bringing people together into the CDC boardroom with government, we can have 100 percent of the discussion.," Holden said.

"We see a tremendous amount of opportunity to not just help government transform but also to benefit those organisations that serve government with technological innovation tied to the commercial innovation, flexibility and optionality that the CDC team has built."

GovSky promises "secure and flexible data centre-based services to meet the growing customer demand for offerings that maintain compliance with policies and regulations".

CDC hopes to lure hosting providers away from "competitive state-based capital city locations" and run their workloads out of its four data centres across two campuses in Canberra, which currently boast 40 megawatts and are approved for "the highest-level security needs of government", said Holden, from unclassified data up to top secret.

CDC plans to increase its capacity to 60MW by the end of 2017.

Holden, who spent more than 15 years at HPE, said: "After spending many years in the industry serving government and enterprise customers as a vendor and service provider, it is very exciting for me to be joining a company committed to and able to truly assist in a digital transformation in this manner."

Greg Boorer, chief executive of CDC, said: “We are uniquely positioned having built our data centre services in a cloud native world to formalise a marketplace that aggregates and connects the community together.

"Starting in 2007, with the future in mind of higher equipment density and needs for less floor space but more power meant that we have already built partnerships with like-minded organisations who provide solutions of great value to government today. To be able to connect those organisations together more formally and enabling the offers to be taken up more broadly is very exciting."