IBM maintains foot in Melbourne IT door
Despite a messy break-up over storage products, Melbourne IT's chief technology officer (CTO) Glenn Gore has told ZDNet Australia that IBM is still the company's preferred partner for server infrastructure.
After a nasty break-up with IBM over storage hardware, Melbourne IT still uses IBM servers as an integral part of its business.(Blades image by gothopotam, CC2.0)
IBM lost part of Melbourne IT's business after the hosting provider moved its storage business towards rival EMC. However, IBM still has its foot in Melbourne IT's door.
Melbourne IT undertook a "mini-review" of its server products to determine whether IBM was appropriate for the hosting provider's needs several months ago.
"We went out and made a shortlist of [suitable] vendors and as a result of that IBM were successful in maintaining our server fleet [business]," Gore said.
While Melbourne IT is satisfied with IBM's offerings for now, Gore said there would be another review of products on the market in a year's time.
"Normally, we review every 12 months as due diligence on what's happening in the market and new products etcetera," he said.
Data corruption that had occurred on IBM storage infrastructure was to blame for an outage which lasted several days at Melbourne IT's WebCentral hosting business.
Melbourne IT managing director and chief executive Theo Hnarakis today repeated the fact that EMC had been able to offer 50 per cent more infrastructure, running at a faster speed for the same cost as its problematic IBM storage investment.
This morning Melbourne IT also released its financial results, posting an earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) profit of $10 million for the first half of 2010, up 8 per cent year on year.
Melbourne IT's EBIT profit is up despite the fact that it saw its revenue slip 6 per cent year on year.
The company has embarked on an $18 million back-of-house software transformation that will see Melbourne IT bursting with Oracle.
The revamp will see Melbourne IT deploy Oracle's Siebel CRM, Business Intelligence suite, Identity Management, Fusion Middleware 11g, Database 11g and Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management products.
Gore said that Melbourne IT plans to deploy the first of the new software into its New Zealand business unit in the first quarter of 2011 with Australia to follow later in that year.