Cloud regulations spark CA's data centre deal

CA Technologies has partnered with Fujitsu to offer its Clarity project and portfolio management software as a service from Australian soil.

Under the deal, CA's Clarity PPM On Demand Suite will be hosted in Fujitsu's Tier III data centres in Homebush Bay and North Ryde, as well as existing facilities in New Jersey, California and Munich.

CA's Clarity sales director John Kearney said the move was driven by the requirements of local State and Federal Government customers, as well as those in "fairly regulated" industries.

"We have several State Government customers and many, many Federal Government clients," Kearney told iTnews.

"Quite a few of them have been in discussions with us about moving from on-premise software [to the software-as-a-service model]."

The three-year contract was signed in October 2010 and announced today. Fujitsu's group executive director of solutions and cloud services Cameron McNaught said CA had access to the platform from November.

Fujitsu was not only CA's infrastructure provider; it was also the first and only customer of the locally hosted Clarity PPM On Demand Suite.

Kearney said that while CA would not force its existing Australian customers to move their data back onshore, the company expected customers to do so for convenience and a slight performance boost.

Price details had not yet been announced, but the locally hosted offering would be slightly more expensive than CA's offshore options due to higher labour and operational costs, he said.

"There is a very small price difference," he said, adding that it was "not a deterrent for customers".

"We envisage that they'll [existing customers] all move back here, but there's certainly no push from us for them to do so."

CA's decision to outsource its local infrastructure was consistent with its international strategy to use managed service providers and focus instead on its "core business", Kearney said.

The Fujitsu deal included servers, storage, internet services, back up and management of the infrastructure, data replication and retrieval.

High volume bandwidth and two internet providers served each data centre, and CA promised to deliver the same systems and service expectations locally as it did from the US.