Gartner recently released its Predictions on IT spending in 2015. In it, a Research Vice President in Gartner’s Technology and Service Provider Research group, John-David Lovelock, made what some would consider a bold prediction about the hyperscale cloud.
“The next inflection point [for hyperscale cloud] will come in 2018, when the needs of digital business will surpass the capacity of traditional data centres, which will be seen as too slow and siloed.”
“Lovelock’s prediction encompasses all geographies so he’s probably correct,” observes Rob Purdy, Director of Cloud and Enterprise Tools, Datacom Australia, “but after reading the report I tweeted that in Australasia it’s likely that date will be earlier.”
Purdy accepts that’s probably an even bolder statement than Gartner’s initial prediction – but here’s the reasoning.
“In A/NZ we’ve always been early adopters,” Purdy says. “When we look back at the evolution of IT, Australasia has always adapted quickly when technology has either provided compelling savings or enabled businesses to move faster.”
According to Purdy, one of the best examples of this was the “rapid, and early, adoption” of virtualisation in the data centre.
“Even now, VMware will confirm that the Australasia region leads the world in virtualisation with around about 80 percent of data centres using either some or extensive virtualisation,” he explains.
“Around the business we have few customers who aren’t asking how they can utilise cloud services, who aren’t already actively assessing migrations or who haven’t already begun migration programmes to Datacom’s cloud service or public clouds.
“This seems to be especially true on the east coast of Australia.”
Due to geographic challenges, Purdy believes South Australia, Western Australia and New Zealand are likely to be slower in adoption of public cloud providers, specifically IaaS.
“When it comes to SaaS-based applications like Office 365,” he adds, “I’m expecting large-scale adoption over the next few years as Microsoft creates attractive bundles under Enterprise Agreements and the announcement of Australian in-country services removes a number of the previous barriers to adoption.
“There are a few hurdles that remain, like the patriot act for example; however in my role I’m in constant contact with Australian and New Zealand Governments and it’s clear that at a national level they are becoming more open to allowing departments/agencies leverage the hyperscale cloud where it makes sense.”
