CA, Unisys bring “private cloud” partnership to Oz

Unisys and CA, which earlier this year announced that they would offer joint cloud services in North America, are planning a rollout in Australia.

The joint services combine CA’s various management products with advisory, planning, design and implementation services from Unisys.

Unisys’ Asia-Pac director for data centre transformation Paul Allen sought to distance the joint offering from the existing CA-Fujitsu cloud services, saying that Unisys had a greater focus on the “private cloud”.

Speaking to a media lunch at CA World Expo in Sydney yesterday (July 25), CA’s VP of strategic solutions Andi Mann noted that enterprises that try to build a private cloud as a DIY project bump into a host of unexpected challenges, many of them legal or administrative rather than IT-related.

For example, there’s licensing: an enterprise’s existing software licenses may be too restrictive or a cloud environment, or at least place new demands on the internal processes the company uses to account for its licenses. “If you are dynamically allocating processes, you have to dynamically allocate those licenses,” Mann said – and you need to be able to account for those license allocations.

SLA management is also likely to come under the spotlight, particularly at the interface between the cloud environment and the telco links that deliver the services. Because carriers remain reluctant to provide back-to-back SLAs with independent cloud providers – particularly as they join the rush into cloud services in their own right – Mann said the ability to “measure everything” and identify external influences on service quality becomes critical.

Allen said that the Australian move is part of a wider push, both into the Asia Pacific and worldwide. Rather than trying to take the whole world by storm, he said the two partners were taking a more incremental approach to the international market.

In an earlier speech to the CA World Expo, Fujitsu Australia's CTO and executive general manager for marketing, Craig Baty, nominated Australia as a possible target for the expansion of the company's Azure-based cloud services. ®