news National broadband provider iiNet announced this week that its newest business product Business Cloud would enable small and medium businesses (SMBs) to develop privately hosted IT infrastructure. Business Cloud aims to spare customers the bother and expense of setting up and maintaining their own IT installations.

iiNet Business Cloud has been established in partnership with leading vendors such as IBM, Juniper and VMware. Businesses can utilise the platform to build and deploy their entire infrastructure in the cloud for a fee starting from $29 a month.

Greg Bader, CEO of iiNet Business said that virtualised computing was often perceived as ‘too hard’ by SMBs, despite it being used by large businesses for many years. “Business Cloud follows from our launch of Business Voice. Put simply, it gives the small guys the same tools of the trade normally reserved for the big enterprise players. Removing barriers to entry and offering total flexibility, these products reflect the needs of operating a small business in today’s challenging environment,” said Bader in a statement.

Bader said that Business Cloud would help companies shift their focus from continuous maintenance and regular upgrades to managing their business. He added that customers felt it important to store their business data in Australian datacentres to ease concerns about data sovereignty and management.

Vice President and Managing Director of VMware Australia and New Zealand, Duncan Bennet spoke about partnering with iiNet: “Powered by our leading cloud computing technology, iiNet customers will utilise Business Cloud to increase IT agility through increased consolidation, task automation and simplified management.”

Features of iiNet Business Cloud include:

• Directly accessing the Business Cloud catalogue and virtual data centres through a user-friendly self-service web portal enables customers to use an operating system of their choice, clone or create virtual machines, and remotely access consoles.
• Business Cloud’s catalogues, virtual appliances, templates and thousands of virtual applications (vApps) can be swiftly accessed and deployed on preconfigured media or machines.
• A variety of enterprise class security features provides a secure virtual environment for businesses to fence their vApps.
• Customers will have access to Business Cloud’s Application Programming Interface.
• Data will be hosted in data centres based in Australia with support from iiNet’s local technical support team.

opinion/analysis
It’s good that iiNet is getting into the cloud computing market; it’s yet another example of the sort of value-added service which Australia’s major ISPs will need to focus on to maintain growth levels. In addition, iiNet, like Telstra and Optus, has an advantage over other cloud computing players; integrating its network infrastructure with its cloud infrastructure should drive performance gains for customers.

However, I remain somewhat cynical about the whole exercise. Bader’s not a chief executive type; for a long time he’s been iiNet’s chief technology officer, and I see a CEO role as primarily a sales role in this context. Similarly, iiNet’s not a company which has typically focused on selling services to businesses in the past; it’s primarily marketed its services at consumers.

In addition, I don’t believe the small to medium business market is really interested in the type of cloud computing which iiNet is offering here; or at least not yet. SMBs aren’t interested in this type of Infrastructure as a Service offering. What they are actually primarily after is Software as a Service: Platforms like NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Google Apps and so on that take care of all the details for them for one flat monthly charge. They rarely want to administer too much themselves. It’s primarily large enterprises at this point who are interested in the sort of IaaS product which iiNet is selling here; and there are probably better options than iiNet out there for IaaS services for this kind of larger organisation. Can iiNet do IaaS better than Fujitsu or CSC? Doubtful.

Having said all that, I think in the medium to long term, SMBs might be interested in this kind of offer; especially as the NBN rolls out. if iiNet can hang on until that point and develop its offering, it may well be well-positioned for the cloud opportunity.

Image credit: Fred Fokkelman, royalty free. Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay

opinion This week, many prominent figures, political and commercial, gathered in that most august of locations, Australia’s Parliament House, to launch what was lauded as a landmark report into the development of the nascent cloud computing industry in this nation.

The proceedings were opened by the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, the Honourable Kim Carr, who exhorted Australia to be more than a “branch office” for cloud computing, but to aspire to something more. In this vein, Carr gravely informed onlookers, he had instructed his department to examine the cloud matter further.

Also attending was Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, whose calm and collected demeanour added a note of bipartisan support to the grand proceedings.

The commercial sector was represented by a cluster of eminent chief executives, flocking together in a tight cohort: Fujitsu’s cheery Mike Foster; VMware’s jovial Duncan Bennet, reserved Macquarie Telecom leader David Tudehope and Matthew Madden, the general manager of little-known cloud player InfoPlex. And I also received a lengthy statement on the matter from the Australian Information Industry Association.

Capping off the event was Nicholas Gruen of Government 2.0 fame, who, along with his colleague Simon Molloy, presented a lengthy report into Australia’s cloud computing landscape and its potential for future development for fun and profit.

Now, as a prominent Australian technology journalist myself, I was forwarded many documents and statements from this majestic event attended by many titled dignitaries. I was invited to attend the ceremony, at which I was assured I would find many press opportunities and lofty personalities with whom I would find it fruitful to commune, over nibbles and in congenial surrounds.

And yet, I still have no real idea what the whole purpose of the whole shebang was.

I read through the speech at the event presented by Minister Carr, which I found contained many important adjectives and verbs. However, I do not believe the speech committed the good Senator or the government in general to any particular course of action. Perhaps Carr was filibustering?

I read through the report (PDF) presented by Gruen’s organisation, Lateral Economics, which I enjoyed greatly with a cup of tea. However, as the report did not go into any particular detail about the nation’s current cloud computing players (not even mentioning Optus or CSC, and barely mentioning Telstra), and sort of only politely seemed to request government assistance in the area, I’m not quite sure what it was about. Perhaps it merits further investigation?

I read through a very impressive media release issued by OzHub (PDF), which appears to be a gathering of Fujitsu, VMware, Macquarie Telecom and InfoPlex, which contained many resplendent statements about improving consumer and business confidence in the cloud. But at the end I wasn’t quite sure what OzHub was aiming to achieve. Perhaps it’s another industry association?

Speaking of industry associations, I also read through a statement on the launch by the venerable Suzanne Campbell, chief executive of the AIIA. “This is about systemic change: there is no one issue that will create the desired outcomes,” argued Campbell. “Australia needs to take action on a number of fronts.” I couldn’t agree more. But what were the real issues? I didn’t know.

I had a similar experience when I was sent another media release this week by another high-ranking Australian IT organisation, Data#3.

The release informed me that in order to serve its customers, the eminent Data#3 had invested in its own Australian cloud infrastructure. I’m not quite sure what sorts of products or services the company will offer using the infrastructure, nor am I sure of any of the details of how it has been built. Nor could I tell you what sorts of customers will be using it.

But I walked away with the impression that Data#3 is a superb company which is definitely doing something in cloud computing. The company’s cloud computing strategy, I am sure, is most imposing — a strong, confident, bold march forward into the future. One that will help us all achieve our visions — whatever those might be.

After I had read all of this information, a certain quandary settled into my consciousness. What did it all mean, I wondered. Was there some overriding message which I was supposed to take from these events? Something about cloud computing? Something about Canberra? Something, perhaps, about the nature of the great game which corporations play with governments for favourable outcomes?

Was there something concrete to be learned?

Or could it be the case, that just like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, all of the players in this week’s drama were merely wandering around in a world beyond their control, unsure of their ultimate role but determined to make it clear that they were doing something? Was it just “a PR company gone mad”?

Surely not.

Those of us who run VMware environments might remember the user furore (including from Australian customers) which the virtualisation giant created a few weeks back when it made a number of changes to its licensing structure. Well, kudos to the company — it listened.

Writes VMware vice preside of product managament Bogomil Balkansky on one of the company’s blogs overnight:

“We have been watching the commentaries on the blogs very carefully, and we have been listening in the customer conversations very intently. We got a ton of feedback that probed the impact of the new licensing model on every possible use case and scenario, and equally important, reflected our customers’ intense passion for VMware.

We are a company built on customer goodwill and we take customer feedback to heart. Our primary objective is to do right by our customers, and we are announcing three changes to the vSphere 5 licensing model that address the three most recurring areas of customer feedback.”

Responding on the blog of the AuTechHeads user group, Sydney-based IT manager Matt Marlor welcomes the changes, noting he’s happy with moves in general. Essentially VMware has decided to substantially raise the vRAM entitlements per vSphere edition, while capping the amount of vRAM counted per virtual machine, and calculate a 12 month average of vRAM consumed rather than using its previous ‘high watermark’ approach.

vRAM, for those not familiar with the concept, is the amount of RAM a VMware virtual machine needs to function. VMware calculates the amount of vSphere licenses customers use by summing up the total amount of vRAM in all of their powered-on virtual machines, and dividing that amount by the entitlement amount for the particular version of vSphere the customer is running.

However, Marlor’s not completely happy with the new policy.

“Now just to be clear, while I’m quite happy with the changes for my part, you’re still going to face some who are unhappy – particularly those who are reliant on the old vSphere 4 limits to RAM. I can appreciate their viewpoint too; taking an entitlement for Standard from 256GB RAM per host to 32GB vRAM is a bit steep. Unfortunately, I don’t think that everyone can feasibly win with the licensing model changes, and you will nonetheless have some unhappy customers.

I’ve said before that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the vRAM model, and I stand by that. You’ve increased the limits to be more fair to customers, and that’s certainly to your credit. I for one am happy with the changes. But is it enough to mollify the customers you’ve angered? Will you lose a lot of smaller customers at the Standard and Essentials end of the scale?”

Only time will tell. The good thing, though, is that VMware is actively listening to its customers right now — and that can only be a good thing.

Image credit: VMware

blog It’s no secret that not everyone is a huge fan of VMware’s flash new licensing structure, with all of those extra clauses it contains, and now the backlash is beginning to hit Australia. Writes Sydney-based IT manager Matt Marlor at AuTechHeads:

“VMware, I know you like money. I know you’ve made a lot of it over the years. I’m sure your parent company, EMC, is thrilled at your financial performance and market capitalisation. I know if I owned your company, I’d be pretty happy. Virtualisation is a hot topic, and seems set to continue that way.

…

But VMware, we need to talk. You’ve made a really bad misstep, and I want to talk you through it.

You see, your announcement of vRAM licensing in vSphere 5 has really aggravated a lot of people – myself included. We don’t feel that your definition of “fair” actually includes customers anymore. Like I said, I don’t mind giving you money – and plenty of others feel that way too. But we do object to being gouged beyond all semblance of what’s reasonable.”

To be honest, the changes VMware have been making remind me a great deal of the way we used to think about Oracle, before a great deal of competition arrived throughout the past decade. Almost a monopoly over its market? Check. Software licensing per core? Check. Intense vendor lock-in with proprietary technologies that makes it impossible to switch to another vendor? Check.

Let’s face it, people: Everyone knew the day would come where VMware’s control of the virtualisation software market grew a little too strong and the company grew a little too greedy. Let’s hope the development pace picks up quickly enough so that some decent alternatives start nipping at its heels. And no, Microsoft Hyper-V — you’re not there yet. Come back when you’re off your training wheels ;)

Image credit: VMware

opinion Right now chief information officers and IT managers right around Australia are facing a difficult decision regarding one of the most critical but also trouble-plagued segments of their IT infrastructure — their desktop fleets.

There are a number of forces coming into play here.

Perhaps the simplest of these is the traditional operating system generational change that we’re all used to by now. With the release of Windows 7 in late 2009, Microsoft has finally delivered a worthy successor to its ageing but still dominant Windows XP platform; and organisations right around Australia are eyeing off this long-awaited upgrade with relish.

However, the case for simply upgrading a bunch of legacy PCs to new hardware running Windows 7 is not as easy a decision as one might have assumed even two years ago. Today the whole paradigm of the desktop PC itself is under siege from a number of angles.

As Australian organisations start to reach the 100 percent server virtualisation mark (and Australia is one of the keenest adopters of this technology in the world), IT workers are looking around for other parts of their IT infrastructure to virtualise, and desktops are a logical next step.

Only this week, NSW electricity utility TransGrid emarked on a 50 user desktop virtualisation project, and it’s not alone. The National Broadband Network Company, the Department of Defence, the Department of Health and Ageing, and the City of Cockburn in Western Australia are all going down this virtualised desktop path.

These organisations are not playing around with thin clients. They are deadly serious about implementing the technology to drive real outcomes in their business. In the age-old centralise/decentralise IT paradigm debate, centralisation is in vogue.

However, there’s also more to the story.

PCs are highly adaptive tools which can be used for many different purposes. But if you’re only after a set of discrete use cases — such as entering data into a CRM platform and checking your email — many organisations are realising that a more specialised unit like an iPad may in fact be a better option.

Australian organisations like Brickworks are already close to ditching the desktop PC or laptop altogether for many staff, with sales staff increasingly equipped with iPads instead. “You can fully expect that as laptops come up for renewal, [the thinking will be] why would you buy a laptop if you could manage it with an iPad?” Brickworks business support manager Baden Bradbury said last month.

But wait, there’s more.

Desktop virtualisation is all well and good, but it’s still a ‘fat’ solution to a problem which can increasingly be solved through a ‘thin’ mechanism instead. With companies like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and even Oracle making strong plays to provide software as a service through a web browser instead of via a desktop deployment, there is often very little reason why many staff members can’t do most of their work in a web browser.

I don’t expect Google’s pure cloud laptops running Chrome OS to take off in Australia, but what I do expect to see is organisations increasingly providing most of their corporate applications to their staff through a web browser or a virtualised application environment from a vendor like Citrix, and the employees themselves increasingly accessing those applications through their own personal PC, rather than a company-provided one.

Indeed, we’re already seeing this trend take force at innovative, technology-friendly companies like Suncorp, which has actually decided not to refresh its corporate desktop fleet. “People should use the device they feel the most productive in,” Suncorp CIO Jeff Smith told the Australian in late March. And we couldn’t agree more.

So what does this all add up to?

For small Australian organisations, the choice is becoming increasingly clear: Outsource as much as is safe to the cloud, facilitate your employees using the equipment they like best, and you’ll cut capital costs out of the business, as well as making yourself popular with your staff.

For medium and large organisations, however, putting together an internal business case around the future of a company’s desktop fleet is going to be a really tough ask in the short to medium term. This is a technology area which is in a constant state of flux at the moment, and few will be brave enough to predict precisely what will happen next.

After all, let’s not forget that the iPad only launched in Australia just over 12 months ago. It is basically impossible to say right now what the next 12 months will bring.

But one thing is clear. The days where Australian organisations would simply shell out hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for a new batch of desktop PCs every three to five years are now over. We are in a new and more complex world now. And that’s not a bad thing.

Image credit: Bruno Cordioli, Creative Commons

The National Broadband Network Company this morning revealed it would deploy Citrix-based desktop and application virtualisation to help provide services to its burgeoning workforce – including third-parties which need access to its systems.

The company currently only has a few hundred staff, but it has been bulking on headcount constantly over the past 18 months, and it is also engaging with a large number of contracting companies as it builds out its national fibre rollout.

Citrix said in a statement this morning that its XenDesktop solution would initially be deployed within NBN Co’s internal IT and network element management teams. “As the organisation continues to grow at an exponential rate, XenDesktop will also be used to rapidly respond to requirements that are still evolving” the statement added.

NBN Co will also uses the FlexCast technology included as part of XenDesktop, which Citrix said will allow the organisation to provide “a range of different application and desktop delivery models” under the one licence – allowing NBN Co the ability to tailor desktop and app delivery to its users bsed on their individual needs – for example, office staff, mobile workers, temporary employees or contractors might have quite different needs.

“NBN Co will be implementing Citrix XenDesktop 5, which also features Citrix’s 64 bit platform XenApp 6 and the Citrix XenClient technology,” Citrix said. NBN Co will receive three years of Citrix support under the deal, with a dedicated account manager, and will employ Citrix Consulting Services to install the technology.

NBN Co end user technology architect Robert Davies said the scalability and ability to centralise control of data inherent to Citrix’s solution was key to the decision.

“We were impressed with Citrix’s ability to integrate into our existing datacentre and desktop systems, as speed to market is an important factor for a young organisation. We have chosen the combination of Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop to give us the flexibility to support all our application provisioning use cases for both internal users and third party users.” Davies said.

The news will come as a blow to virtualisation competitor VMware, which has been strongly pushing the case for Australian organisations to implement desktop virtualisation, putting together a specialist crack team in mid-2010 to tackle the opportunity of migrating legacy ‘fat client’ PCs to the new lighter model.

So far there have only been a handful of known large virtual desktop implementations in Australia, with organisations like the City of Cockburn in Western Australia conducting a rollout of 200 desktops last year based on VMware View and the Federal Department of Health and Ageing also revealing plans for a rollout – although it has not stated which vendor’s solution it plans to use.

Image credit: Ariel da Silva Parreira, royalty free

The long-time managing director of VMware Australia and New Zealand has been promoted to an Asia-Pacific and Japan role, with his replacement to be Duncan Bennet, the former leader of Sun Microsystems in Australia.

“Today VMware announced the appointment of Paul Harapin as vice president, business development & cloud for the company’s Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region,” VMware said in a statement this morning, confirming a report in the Financial Review. “He takes up the newly-created post after serving as vice president and managing director of VMware Australia and New Zealand, which he joined in April 2005.”

Harapin (pictured) will still report to VMware’s Asia-Pacific & Japan chief Andrew Dutton.

The move marks the end of an era for VMWare Australia. Harapin is extremely well-known in the local technology sector, having taken VMWare locally from a division with just four people, to a large regional basis of some 220 people, according to Harapin’s LinkedIn profile.

“We have driven a virtualisation market share almost double any other region globally and with over 9000 customers built up in this 5 year period, and over 1,000 partners,” the profile states.

Harapin’s replacement, Bennet, was for a short time the managing director of ill-fated hardware and software giant Sun Microsystems throughout 2008, but he resigned in early 2009 after less than a year and after Sun Australia took a giant revenue hit of about $100 million – which Bennet said at the time was the result of revenue spiking the previous year through a large deal with Telstra.

Bennet joined the company at the same time as another senior industry executive, Steve Coad, who took on the role of director of enterprise sales. Bennet was appointed as director of sales (commercial & SMB) at VMware in March 2010. The executive’s new role is general manager of Australia and New Zealand – and he won’t report to Harapin, instead also working under APJ chief Dutton.

Image credit: VMware

blog Regular readers will know of the somewhat … intense debate that has been going on between various factions in the Delimiterverse over the past few months with relation to the question of what is the best corporate email platform.

On the one hand you’ve got the centralised command and control communist shock troops representing Microsoft’s dominant Outlook/Exchange ecosystem, while on the other side of the coin you’ll find the idealistic dreamers; the flower power hippy love children evangelising Google Apps.

Now without going into the specifics of that debate, I’d like to pose a question: Is there room for a substantive third player? And I’m not looking at you, Lotus Notes; you’ve had your day and will now shortly be consigned to the graveyard where bloated legacy software suites go to sleep until you are awakened for a second open source renewal.

The reason I ask is because of this interesting little job advertisement posted this week by that doyenne of virtualisation, VMware, relating to its Zimbra collaboration suite, which has recently slipped in between the covers with that hot young thing, iiNet. Writes VMware:

The Zimbra Solution representative — ANZ is responsible for building Zimbra’s local business in ANZ. [The successful applicant will] build a local Zimbra community of partners, customers and developers to promote open source email and collaboration [and] establish Zimbra as the open source leader in the local market by holding off-site events, speaking at open source and software events in ANZ.

Frankly, I haven’t used or administered Zimbra myself, but I’m informed the solution is fairly robust … and clearly iiNet — an innovator itself — must believe in the package if it is prepared to commit a million mailboxes to it. So let’s hear your thoughts. The Google Apps vs Exchange war is still raging in Australia … but could Zimbra come in unexpected and sideswipe them both?

Image credit: Adam Blum, royalty free

Just 24 hours after publicly denying it had renewed its long-running comprehensive IT outsourcing arrangement with technology behemoth IBM, the Federal Department of Health and Ageing (DOHA) has reversed its statement and confirmed the arrangement.

Yesterday, iTnews published an article on the contract renewal, stating the department had “denied” an earlier report by the AustralianIT detailing a renewal of the deal had taken place. The pair have had a long-running relationship dating back to 1999.

“This week, a spokesman for DOHA told iTnews that the department’s IT future was still very much up in the air, with an announcement to be made at some stage in early 2011,” iTnews reported, with the publication adding DOHA’s spokesperson had said the department only asked the permission of the Department of Finance to renegotiate with IBM in case it needed to.

However, this afternoon the department confirmed a $109 million, four-year renewal had been signed, in a statement issued by IBM. The contract includes a variation to the final year — through mid-2011 — of the pair’s existing relationship.

The deal will see IBM continue to provide a range of services to the department, including mainframe, mid-range, storage, help desk and end user computing services. In addition, Big Blue will now also provide new security compliance solutions and will conduct mainframe and storage upgrades.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the new agreement will be the included rollout of a desktop virtualisation platform to all of DOHA’s 4,500-odd staff.

“Commencing in the first half of 2011, IBM will deploy a virtualised thin client desktop solution across the entire department, enabling the movement of staff and workloads at a moment’s notice, whilst lowering technology support costs and increasing network performance,” IBM’s statement said. It is not immediately clear what technology the virtual desktops will be based on, but one possibility is VMware’s View platform, which has recently won a number of small customers around Australia.

VMware revealed in August that it had put together a specialist local crack team to tackle the opportunity of converting legacy “fat client” PC desktops in Australian organisations to the next generation of slimline virtualised environments.

In late June the City of Cockburn revealed it was one of the first — potentially the first — organizations in Australia to undertake a roll-out of virtualised desktops across its entire operations — shifting some 200 desktop PCs to VMWare’s View solution (version 4.0). In tendering documentation released late this year, the City of Norwood, Payneham and St Peters in South Australia revealed it had also standardised on VMWare View.

However, VMware rival Citrix also has a desktop virtualisation solution — XenDesktop — which also allows applications to be delivered as a service to users’ machines.

Image credit: Kurhan, royalty free

The cloud infrastructure consortium which counts VMware, Cisco and EMC as its members has added yet another major Australian company to its growing list of conquests, revealing yesterday that NBN Co had inked a contract with lead supplier Cisco to kit out its datacentre to the tune of $9.5 million over the next three years.

VCE has been going from strength to strength in Australia over the past few months, signing up end user customers like Westpac and Corporate Express, as well as service providers like CSC and telcos like Optus to buy its products.

In a statement issued yesterday, Cisco said it would deploy NBN Co’s solution, utilising the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) which is jointly contributed by Cisco itself, as well as EMC and virtualisation player VMware. The trio’s stack is known as ‘Vblock’. Pictured above is Cisco global chief executive John Chambers.

“We are pleased to have acquired yet another strategic supplier as we continue to construct the building blocks that underpin the operation of the NBN,” said NBN Co head of corporate services Kevin Brown in a statement.

“Cisco is recognised as a leader in global networking equipment manufacture, and brings a wealth of experience to the project. We look forward to working with their 600-strong team in Australia as we develop the supporting infrastructure for the NBN.”

The contract was welcomed by the respective leaders of the three supplier companies — Cisco’s Les Williamson, EMC’s David Webster and VMware’s Paul Harapin.

The news comes as organisations around Australia have recently flagged plans to accelerate their journey towards the sort of private cloud computing solutions represented by the VCE coalition.

EMC Global Services director for Australia and New Zealand, Adrian Ianessa, recently said in an interview that he was seeing a huge uptake in VCE solutions in Australia — which he said indicated the trust and credibility that the individual consortium members had with customers.

In practice, he said, the trio’s sales and pre-sales teams would work closely together on opportunities. In some cases Cisco would take the prime role — as with NBN Co — and in other cases, EMC or VMware. The Vblock solutions can also be purchased through partners such as Dimension Data.

In general, he said, it was a number of industry verticals taking up the solutions. Service providers CSC and Optus jumped on board very early, but customers in other sectors — such as banking and even education — were also taking up the offering.

Image credit: Cisco