'œIntense' interest but no Aussie Google datacentre yet

Renai LeMay
Monday, 15 February 2010 09:40

IT Industry - Strategy

Google has refused to rule out constructing an Australian datacentre, amid what analysts and partners say is 'intense' interest from large Australian organisations in the search giant's cloud computing Apps suite.

At an event held in Sydney last week, global IT outsourcer CSC revealed it would start selling hosted Microsoft messaging and collaboration applications such as Exchange, Sharepoint and Office Communications Server from an Australian datacentre as part of a strong push into cloud computing solutions.

CSC's Australasian chief technology and innovation officer Bob Hayward also revealed CSC would offer the full suite of Google Apps to Australian organisations, saying customers were displaying 'intense interest' in cloud computing solutions specifically from Microsoft and Google.

But at the event, Google's Asia-Pacific head of market development Deepak Ramanathan stopped short of committing to local infrastructure.

'For us to say this is the right path is difficult,' he said, saying the search giant was not ruling out an Australian datacentre for services like GMail, and that discussions were ongoing.

Industry speculation about Google hosting an Australian datacentre has swirled off and on since the search giant started winning large hosted email deals in Australian educational institutions over the past several years, with the largest being a migration of 1.5 million NSW students to GMail from Microsoft Exchange.