NEC Australia gets into data centre services market

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 28 July 2009 11:40

IT Industry - Strategy

NEC Australia is continuing its move into the services market with the launch of high grade data centre hosting services provided out of the tier 3 Polaris data centre in Queensland and aimed at SMEs and 'media focussed' businesses.

NEC Australia has taken 500 square metres of space within the Polaris data centre and fitted it out with racks, servers, networking equipment and high speed Internet access. It will offer a full range of services, starting from simple rack space through dedicated servers to VMware based virtualised processing capacity and hosted applications through its Applications Net offering.

According to Loren Wiener, product manager data centres & hosted solutions, NEC Australia, the offering will appeal to businesses with a high reliance on data availability. "Businesses in the media industry or those that rely entirely on the Internet to do business, place a high value on uptime and the assurance that they can continue to operate. To date only the largest businesses have been able to take advantage of hosted managed services from high grade data centres as they are reluctant to offer space by the rack. NEC is opening up the market."
 
NEC Australia also sees a market for larger organisations with a need for high assurance business continuity provision. According to Weiner, "CIOs that have invested heavily in their data centre and IT operations need a recovery site that matches their specifications. They may only need a fraction of the space to keep core processes running but to date they have been forced into lower grade data centre, compromising their DR strategy. We see a big market for disaster recovery as we can offer the highest grade of assurance on a rack by rack basis."
 
NEC Australia announced in June a goal to grow its service revenues from 50 percent to 70 percent of total business earnings in the next five years. This followed an announcement in March of a restructure to focus on services, unified communications and display solutions.

NEC has been involved with the Polaris data centre which opened in February 2009 since its inception. Polaris, a $220m, 7,000 square metres data centre is part of the new city of Greater Springfield development in South East Queensland. In March 2007 NEC signed a deal with the Springfield Land Corporation, developer of Greater Springfield, to provide communications facilities to residents. NEC planned to house infrastructure to support the services in the Polaris data centre and to interconnect with the network of several telcos.