Macquarie Telecom bids for hosted SAP business

Macquarie Telecom is looking to provide business software as a service through SAP and its partners, after becoming Australia’s third data centre operator to have its infrastructure certified by the German software vendor.

The certification process commenced last year and involved an “extensive audit” to verify that Macquarie Telecom’s infrastructure could sustain hosted SAP applications.

A Macquarie Telecom spokeswoman said it would not offer SAP software as a service directly but would work with the company and its Australian partners to deliver cloud and managed services.

“We are now exploring further opportunities to collaborate with SAP, particularly around the growing business needs for software-as-a-service and mobility within the applications space,” said Aidan Tudehope, Macquarie Telecom’s managing director of hosting.

SAP has offered on-demand applications from its US and European data centres since 2010. Earlier this year, NSW Trade and Investment agreed to run SAP’s Business ByDesign software from servers based in Germany.

Fujitsu and Telstra offer SAP software as a service to customers directly, from their SAP-certified facilities in Australia.