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Aussie Cloud services broker ac3 eyes expansion outside NSW base

The Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications, now known as ac3, was founded in 2000 by the New South Wales (NSW) government in partnership with eight universities, reports David Hazan.
Written by ZDNet Staff, Contributor

Originally designated as a supercomputing research centre, the Sydney-based firm now specialises in managed services for government departments, says CEO Monique McIntosh. Services include data centre, networking, security, virtualisation and mobility.

The company's roster of clients includes 136 New South Wales government departments. "90% of NSW government departments touch us in some way," McIntosh claims.

The business currently employs 58 full-time employees, and generated revenues of $15 million in the last financial year. It was recently added to the Australian Department of Finance's data-centre-as-a-service (DCaaS) Multi Use List (MUL).

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ac3 CEO Monique McIntosh

The company works with a number of third-party vendor partners, including CA Technologies and Dimension Data.

"ac3 is very proud to work with the other vendors in the market. We don't see them as our competition," McIntosh says.

In addition to its private cloud offerings, ac3 also provides brokerage services, the CEO notes that 46 percent of the company's customer base is looking for a broker for services other than the ones ac3 provides.

"We refer to ourselves as a 'broker', however we are probably closer to being a cross between a cloud services broker (CSB) and a multi-sourcing services integrator (MSI),” McIntosh adds.

As a CSB, ac3 acts on behalf of customers to manage and maintain one or more cloud services. As a MSI, the company acts as an agent to integrate services and service delivery into the private cloud, facilitating collaboration with other providers.

Driving shared value is part of ac3's growth strategy for the next two years. The company's place on the MUL is motivated by a drive to add federal government clients to its solid NSW government client base.

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