Pernod Ricard pioneers Novell cloud beta

Beverley Head
Thursday, 22 July 2010 09:19

Business IT - Technology

Liquor group Pernod Ricard Australia has emerged as one of the early local pioneers for Novell’s Cloud Manager, currently available in beta form, prior to the product’s formal launch slated for September.

Ryan Klose, chief information officer of Premium Wine Brands for Pernod Ricard, which is one of a handful of companies testing the product internationally, believes that it will provide the organisation with an edge, and allow it to have a much clearer and more granular understanding of its IT use and costs. It might ultimately also allow the company, which currently has an internal private cloud model, to consider using public clouds.

Klose is responsible for all the company’s global wine brands in Australia, New Zealand, Spain and Argentina. To meet the complex processing needs of this group Klose has developed a services oriented architecture and moved toward providing Infrastructure and Platform as a Service.

Until it began using Cloud Manager it had attempted to manage much of the system allocation, costing and asset management involved with the cloud model using spreadsheets. “We had lost a bit of visibility in there. We were trying to do this on a spreadsheet but lost control,” Klose told iTWire.

Paul Kangro, Novell technology strategist, explained the company’s intent with the product – originally developed under the codename Project Atlantic - was to develop a tool that would inject more rigour into the cloud provisioning process. “In the past when people needed a machine they put in a purchase requisition form which was signed off on; there was a level of process.

“In the cloud world it can be as simple as using the company credit card. You lose some of the rigour,” according to Kangro.

Novell Cloud Manager is intended to “put the rigour back by integrating the workflow and injecting some level of financials into each machine.”