Published on the 05/03/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
The data centre industry in Australia is booming with three major new data centres announced in the space of a week…
NEXTDC, an Australian data centre operator founded in mid-2010; LiveOps, a US-based provider of cloud-based contact centre systems; and OpenText, the global provider of enterprise information management software, have all made announcements regarding new data centres in the past week.
NEXTDC had an official opening of its fifth data centre in the Perth suburb of Malaga, by Western Australia premier Colin Barnett. NEXTDC CEO, Craig Scroggie, said the event marked completion of phase one of the company’s plan. “We now have state-of-the-art facilities in the five key ICT markets in Australia.”
The facility, dubbed P1, is Uptime Institute Tier III certified for both design and as a constructed building, and one of only eight data centres in Australia certified Tier III for both design and building construction. When fully fitted out it will provide 5.5 megawatts of IT load across 3000 square metres of technical space and house up to 1500 racks.
NEXTDC has named Perth-based telco Amcom and Metwide, a provider of network and IT infrastructure, as early customers. Amcom COO, Michael Knee, said that his company’s use of NEXTDC’s five locations across Australia’s capital cities “gives our customers the freedom to complement their existing infrastructure environment with a consistent environment with national diversity.”
Cloud-based contact centre vendor LiveOps has announced the opening of a new data centre in Sydney “to better serve the needs of its growing Australian and New Zealand customer base and partner network.”
LiveOps’ technology enables its clients to engage in real-time interactions with customers across multiple channels, including voice, email, web chat, social and SMS. The company claims more than 300 customers around the globe and 65 in Australia and New Zealand, including Symantec, Amway and ADT.
LiveOps’ chairman and CEO, Marty Beard, said the new data centre would support LiveOps’ plans for rapid growth in the local market and provide customers with high-speed access to the cloud-based network. Research firm Frost and Sullivan has forecast that over 60 percent of organisations in Australia are likely to evaluate or deploy cloud-based contact centre systems in the next two years.
According to Kristen Pimpini, managing director, ANZ for LiveOps, “There is enormous demand right now for multi-channel cloud contact centre solutions like LiveOps. Companies are looking for help to better manage their own customer relationships across increasingly fragmented but important channels.”
He said the new Sydney data centre would open up new industries as potential customers for LiveOps “because it offers improved performance and addresses data sovereignty issues.”
The launch of a Sydney data centre follows LiveOps raising $US30 million for global expansion from Comerica Bank, the single largest round of funding in the company’s history.
OpenText, which has over 50,000 customers using its enterprise information management software around the world, has opened its first data centre in Australia, also in Sydney, saying it will address data sovereignty issues for Australian clients and boost OpenText’s cloud performance for local customers through lower latency times.
The move takes the number of OpenText data centres to 10 – others are in the USA and Europe. OpenText says that 3000 customers globally have taken up its cloud-based offerings and it expects this number to grow rapidly following its recent acquisition of GXS a global B2B e-commerce and integration services company that claims to have over 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies as its customers.
