By Freya Purnell
SAP Australia has established the first in what it says will be a series of local data centres equipped to provide Australian organisations with access to SAP HANA in the cloud.
The data centre, located in Sydney, will offer existing SAP customers to opportunity to transfer their existing licences to gain access to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, the company’s private managed cloud infrastructure service.
SAP has established the local data centre in response to customer demand, with many Australian businesses and agencies keen to access real-time in-memory computing, but reluctant to either invest in an on-premise deployment or have their data hosted offshore.
Paul Muller, general manager, platform solutions, SAP Australia and New Zealand, said there is both a solid technology and business value proposition behind having a local data centre option.
Muller said the ability to move existing SAP licences to this managed cloud service appeals to businesses seeking to reduce capital expenditure.
“This allows them to free up some of their investment in networks and hardware to have them managed in a data centre. In a cash-tight economy, that will enable them to invest in other areas of innovation, ideally with SAP,” Muller said.
The flexibility of the Enterprise Cloud offering will also lead to faster adoption amongst customers, according to Muller.
“Many customers have a desire to move to HANA, but in order to look at changes in configuration around their hardware and their project cycle in addition to capital expenditure, having this available means that they can move to the facility and also adopt HANA much faster than their usual cycles,” he said.
From a technology perspective, it meets the needs of those who need to have data maintained at a local level, as well as those looking to take advantage of the benefits of a true real-time environment.
“Being able to have a data centre onshore means that we don’t have the latency that we might have if we had messaging structures around the world,” Muller said.
New customers will have to purchase SAP on-premise licenses that can then be transferred to the cloud, but Muller said the company will be making announcement on subscription-based models “in due course”.
SAP Australia is also currently looking at other Australian locations for HANA Enterprise Cloud data centres. Muller said they are generally looking at the capital cities, “but there is no one particular city that is necessarily a standout – we could put something into Melbourne as much as the ACT or Brisbane,” Muller said. “What we have recognised is that we do want to share the workload, because we want customers to have close proximity and access to centres to provide high disaster recovery and security.”
Data sovereignty concerns, alleviated by having a local data centre, are most relevant to public sector organisations and also entities which have to disclose their data footprint to government bodies, such as banking and finance companies and some telecommunication providers, said Muller.
Steve Hodgkinson, research director IT, Asia Pacific at Ovum, said providing local options will be a critical factor in the success of cloud players.
“The winners of the cloud services game will be those that can leverage global infrastructure and software for economies of scale as well as the ability to operate locally when customers require locally accountable providers and control over the location of their data. Cloud services providers targeting the enterprise market must learn how to play both globally and locally,” Hodgkinson said.
