Less than six months after launching into the Canberra data centre market, Verizon Business has announced plans to expand its federal government business off the back of stronger than expected demand for its cloud services offering.
Speaking to Computerworld Australia, Verizon consultant Ray McQuillan said while the Canberra location suggested a charge into the local government market, the company’s presence would serve a broader marketplace.
“We do have customers in the state, local and federal government,” he said. “This is a financial growth market for us and it brings solutions down to Canberra and is part of the larger list.”
The comments follow news from Verizon that it will within the next 12 months bring its Computing as a Service (CaaS) service to be hosted in its Canberra data centre.
The news follows comments from the company in May, when Verizon's ANZ president, John Karabin, said the company was considering moving into the Sydney and Melbourne data centre market in a bid to adopt Computing as a Service as an offering.
While McQuillan said he “was not able to discuss” who Verizon’s local clients were, he did say the company were planning on adding 5500 additional server cabinets for enterprise clients, and was targeting organisations in the multinational, government and banking sectors.
With federal bureaucrats recently warning Australian organisations that our economy may not be big enough to play host to a cloud computing hub, Qullian said its an issue organisations must take into account.
“The issue of where data is stored is one that individual businesses need to make decisions about separately,” he said.
Verizon’s $17.2 billion investment will run across a number of locations worldwide, andcomes despite the company only moving into the data centre and cloud market in June.