Opinion: No clouds for regional Australia?

This week I spoke to two small-business IT service providers based in Toowoomba and in Sydney.

I posed the same question to both: "Are more customers buying virtualisation products?"

The Sydney integrator said customers, with as few as 10 employees, were very interested in buying virtualisation servers.

He said virtualisation allowed smaller businesses to buy a server that they replicated to handle all their data without worrying about buying another one.

He said this was fast becoming a trend among his SMB customers.

It showed Australian businesses weren't behind the times.

Analyst firm, Gartner, which tracks the use of technology in business, said there was plenty of opportunity for local resellers in virtualisation services and hardware.

Erica Gadjuli, principal research analyst at Gartner said virtualisation on Intel servers have made an impact on the volume of hardware-server shipments.

Gadjuli said customer spending from virtualisation software and services offered vendors another revenue stream.

She said this also represented an "opportunity for resellers".

But the Toowoomba integrator said his regional customers showed little interest in cloud computing.

He said customers were very hands-on with their IT and showed no interest in technology they couldn't control.

The main issue for these regional customers was "unstable broadband", he said.

He didn't think internet services to regional areas was good enough for customers to rely on, especially for virtualisation.

Do you believe differently? Are regional customers less inclined to invest in cloud computing due to broadband issues? Are SMBs in metropolitan areas more likely to invest in technology?

Join the conversation below to share your thoughts with your peers.