Data#3 eyes national data centre network

Data#3 plans to create a national network of data centres servicing customers in major Australian cities in response to demand among the company's customers for hybrid cloud services.

The integrator said it is in discussions with a "national data centre provider" to lease co-location space in premium data centres across Australia within the next two to three years.

Data#3 currently leases racks in two unnamed data centres in Brisbane and Melbourne.

“Our object would be to have a presence in data centres in all major cities in Australia in two to three years time, acting as a back up to customers in other locations," said Data#3 managing director John Grant. "Over time we’ll have access to a network of data centres.”

Grant said the company has an opportunity to scale the infrastructure it has purchased to offer 'cloud services' to meet demand.

“One third of what we have now is utilised and in use, so two thirds are available and when that gets fully utilised, we’ll duplicate that again.”

The company yesterday announced it would provide infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) alongside its traditional software licensing business in response to customer demand for hybrid models.

This adds an off-premises "pay per use" alternative to Data#3's traditional software and hardware procurement, consulting, systems integration and outsourcing businesses.

Grant said the hybrid model - which he defined as the delivery of specific applications and infrastructure as-a-service - is “the real world” IT solution customers are looking for.

“The problem with the industry is we’ve portrayed it as everything is about cloud and it’s not,” he said. “It’s about helping the customer to deploy parts of their infrastructure in a hybrid model.”

Grant said "99.9 percent of customers have all of their IT systems and applications in an on-premise or outsourced environment.

"It’s traditional stuff,” he said. “Along comes cloud pay-per-use, and [customers] want to take advantage of it, but they want to do that while having most of their computing in an on-premise environment.”

Data#3 services customers in the banking and finance, mining, tourism and leisure, legal, healthcare, manufacturing and distribution industries as well as government and utilities.