Published on the 13/04/2015 | Written by Beverley Head

With investment in cloud and infrastructure a top-four CIO priority, VMware will face tough competition in the region from Amazon, Microsoft and Google…

Four months after announcing plans to launch a local instance of vCloud Air in Australia, VMware turned on the infrastructure-as-a-service offering last week. Based initially in Telstra’s Melbourne data centre the Australian hosted version of vCloud Air will be made available to both Australian and New Zealand companies.

Touted as a seamless way for VMware users to move workloads around between in-house, private and public clouds, while keeping data in Australia, the system is being sold by Telstra, VMware’s managed service providers, partners and resellers across A/NZ, while ad hoc users can also go online to use their credit card to buy the cloud service.

Deloitte is one of VMware’s Australian partners and is working with clients to establish a range of new services including using the local vCloud Air platform to deliver SAP solutions as a service.

The company will face stiff opposition in the IaaS space however, as according to Gartner this market remains dominated in Australia by Amazon Web Services, but increasingly also Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine.

Gartner research director Michael Warrilow recently issued a report saying that investment in cloud and infrastructure was a top four priority for Australian CIOs in the coming year as economic screws tightened.

He predicted that local companies would seriously explore multi sourcing over the next year, with businesses managing a range of cloud providers and different infrastructure technologies.

The entry level vCloud Air compute configuration being offered in the US and Australia is slightly different so it’s not as easy to compare like for like. So while entry level compute in the US includes 120 GB of vRam and 30 Ghz CPU costing US$5978 per month, the entry level option in Australia is for 240 GB vRam and 35 GHz CPU costing A$9441 a month.

It is possible to compare the cost of 6 Tb of standard storage however. Australians will pay A$495 a month compared to about A$468 US users are charged, based on exchange rates at the time of writing.

The company is trying to offer a wide range of options to access the service – offering monthly subscriptions, on demand hourly rates, even a subscription processing program allowing users to buy a pool of credits that can be redeemed as required.

Telstra has been selected as the initial host for the service in Australia, but the company said other data centres could be brought on stream depending on market demand.

While local companies are a clear target for the new IaaS, VMware vice president and managing director for A/NZ, Duncan Bennet said that he expected multinationals from the US and Europe which already had access to vCloud air in those markets could leverage the local instance of the cloud to shift workloads to this marketplace.

In a recent blog Gartner research director Kyle Hilgendorf noted that VMware had been relatively slow to flesh out some of its vCloud Air functions. He said that VMware’s recent announcement that it would work with Google to integrate its cloud services with the vCloud Air was a smart move for both companies, delivering Google with a boost to its enterprise credibility while vCloud Air could meet a wide range of user expectations.

VMware last week confirmed that the Google services would be integrated on the local instance of the vCloud air platform.