Red Hat teases: Who is its Australian cloud customer?

Amazon, NTT-DiData, Savvis among the contenders.

Delegates at a Sydney open source conference this week heard that a cloud provider would launch in Australia shortly.

In his open source Pacific conference keynote speech yesterday, Red Hat business development manager Colin McCabe said a Red Hat cloud-provider customer would soon launch in Australia.

He said open source was the "foundation of the cloud", naming Amazon Web Services, IBM and Savvis as companies that ran public clouds on Red Hat infrastructure.

Amazon technology evangelist Simone Brunozzi followed McCabe's presentation with a pitch for Amazon's EC2, S3 and CloudFront offerings.

Content delivery network CloudFront had 16 points of presence in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific. It had nodes in Hong Kong and Japan and a data centre in Singapore. Brunozzi said another data centre would launch in Asia Pacific "in the coming months".

He declined to disclose details, directing iTnews' queries to a spokesman who said: "We plan to have data centres in different countries over time".

Although no plans were disclosed, Amazon in April said it was "optimistic" about launching an Australian data centre.

"We call Singapore our first in Asia Pacific because others will follow," said Amazon's senior vice president for web services Andy Jassy when the Singapore facility was launched.

"[Australia] has some very interesting businesses and we are very hopeful and optimistic about [having] a data centre presence in Australia in the near future."

Japanese telco NTT could be another Red Hat customer capable of an Australian launch through its $3.6 billion offer for Dimension Data in July.

According to Dimension Data's Australian chiefe executive officer, Steve Nola, the proposed acquisition was on schedule for completion by the end ofnext month .

Although he would not speculate on NTT's plans, Nola said Dimension Data's initial post-acquisition focus would be on providing solutions, systems integration and managed services to NTT's Australian customers.

"We are excited with the possibilities that the proposed acquisition may open up, but it is too early to speculate on any new combined capabilities should the acquisition be successful," he told iTnews today.

"The mutual opportunities around cloud computing are certainly something we are excited about reviewing in due course."

According to Red Hat's McCabe, a market for cloud computing had developed from increasing IT complexity and tightening budgets.

"We hear a lot of media about cloud on the market and most of it -- unfortunately, in our perspective -- is around VMware and Microsoft."

Because no cloud computing provider had "all the bells and whistles yet" only open systems such as Red Hat's Deltacloud would deliver truly flexible utility computing, he said.