OpenText invests $1 million to open Australian datacentre

Telstra and Computershare will be a handful of Australian companies that will no longer have to deal with issues concerning data sovereignty and data proximity, following OpenText announcing its investment in a Sydney-based datacentre.

The new facility was commissioned in January, and will offer a variety of enterprise-class cloud computing services and applications for securely managing, exchanging, and socialising enterprise information. These include managed hosting services, enterprise content management, and digital asset management solutions.

During OpenText's Innovation Day in Sydney, OpenText CIO Patrick Harper said the first Australian datacentre will mean that data hosted by OpenText's cloud environment will remain "in-country".

"There's a growing requirement for when we're hosting environments for enterprise data management or are transacting cloud-based services for clients, and that involves data sovereignty, data proximity, and data security. The desire to keep their data on the continent is paramount, as it's key to their compliance strategy," he said.

"The datacentre is also used to provide local telecommunications services and connections to those customers who don't want to keep their data, but transact their data through the network."

OpenText vice president of sales for ANZ Kevin Hayes continued on to say that while there are a lot of local enterprise customers keen to move into the cloud, the inability to offer data sovereignty has restricted it in the past.

"We're seeing more interest from local companies who are putting in place a cloud strategy because it ensures they have a more flexible solution on their resources that can add real value," he said.

The establishment of a new datacentre facility follows OpenText's $1.1 billion acquisition last month of GXS Group, a business-to-business cloud integration service provider. Harper said there are plans to grow GXS over years to support more device-to-device communications, as it's believed that "in the lead up to 2020, we see device communication as a requirement to drive digital disruption".

OpenText's investment in an Australian datacentre complements the existing nine datacentres across the USA and Europe. Harper said there are plans in the next three years to invest in excess of US$40 million in the infrastructure of its datacentre.