Australia leads in cloud services adoption: Dell

Given Australia's progressive adoption rate of virtualisation it has subsequently set the country up to become a strong adoption of cloud services as well, according to Jeremy Ford, Dell cloud services executive director.

Speaking with ZDNet during Dell World 2014, Ford said when virtualisation reached a level of maturity that's when Australia began adopting it, and the country adopted it really fast, which has helped position Australia to adopt new technology faster.

"I think Australia is in a unique position because it was very aggressive and very pervasive in its adoption of virtualisation. Just after virtualisation was just happening in other countries, Australia reached a higher penetration of it faster," he said.

"Now as cloud comes behind virtualisation, Australia is much more prepared holistically on a percentage basis because Australia's technology is faster than some of the other organisations, who are still struggling with how you re-factor mainframes, and how do you reconcile the nine or 10 datacentres you already have."

For a long time, Dell was able to grow its cloud services business in Australia organically with a datacentre in Brisbane, before it partnered with Polaris to operate one in Canberra.

Furthermore, Dell also just last month added two additional datacentres in partnership with Digital Realty. During the same time, Dell announced it entered into a partnership with local cloud solutions player 6YS, the latest member of the Dell Cloud Partner Program.

"Now we're able to leverage our organic investment plus an ecosystem of partners to give more capabilities than we would have of if we were a standalone. In addition to our supply of global providers to Australia, having local regional providers like 6YS we are be able to provide cloud services in-country," Ford said.

In fact, according to Ford, Australia represents how Dell envisions for its cloud services space.

"Australia has been a really good example of how we want to evolve, and it represents our evolution cloud services," he said.

Ford added in comparison to counterparts such as the US, in Australia there's a " more of a willingness to go bigger and faster into some of either managed or hosted virtual desktop, general outsourcing, and co-lo. We are definitely seeing a progressive interest in cloud services".

Also, unlike a lot larger corporations in the US where there's a lot of established infrastructure, because of Australia's aggressive adoption of virtualisations, there are more workloads that are ready to move to a cloud environment.

"There's more an interest to leverage the investments that have been made in datacentres from different providers, versus the need to feel like you need to build your own, then the ability to connect that to a global market is a big interest," Ford said.

Aimee Chanthadvong travelled as a guest of Dell to Dell World 2014.