Australia's transition to multi-cloud is outpacing global peers
Australia was the leading country in the world for virtualisation and according to Duncan Hewett, senior vice president and general manager for VMware's business in Asia Pacific and Japan, the country's transition to consuming multi-cloud environments is accelerating faster than anywhere else as well.
"It is the way people operate and if you continued down a who-is-who in Australia, they're running VMware and that's continued to accelerate," he told ZDNet during VMworld in Las Vegas this week.
"The difference now is they're actually adding more workloads as well, so we're now starting to see what I would call a remediation of clients that have multiple environments, who are now deciding they're going to run a core system and a private cloud and are going to move as many workloads as they can to the private cloud.
"We have multiple clients -- government, banking, telco -- in the same stage of development in Australia, it's pretty impressive actually in terms of what the clients are doing."
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Australia is on the radar of VMware executives on a global scale in terms of its creativity and leading multi-cloud adoption, with Peder Ulander from VMware's Networking and Security Business Unit noting also that Australians adopt technology faster than anyone else when it's disruptive.
"Australia is heavily virtualised and when you step back and say well what's going on there, it comes back to that fundamental practice of being fast adopters of next-generation technologies," he told ZDNet.
"For every dollar you spend on [virtualization] software you get $3-$5 back in hardware costs -- on capex, opex -- so there is an element of Australian frugality from the business perspective as it is about getting better optimisation and getting more out of the people that are working."
VMware announced this week the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS for customers in Australia and New Zealand, with AWS Australia and New Zealand managing director Paul Migliorini saying customers in Australia are keen to move more workloads to the public cloud.
"The velocity of what we're seeing across enterprise in Australia and New Zealand is doing nothing but going up," Migliorini explained.
"Customers are seeking to innovate faster, they're seeking to leverage the power of their data more effectively, and as a big part of that they're seeking to remove the friction that's associated with legacy platforms like datacentres and legacy hardware, and so increasingly what they want to do is move large amounts of their workloads to the public cloud.
"We think this is so powerful, as it allows them to move large amounts of workloads to the public cloud with minimal to no disruption to their existing application environment and they solve a whole bunch of other problems in their business."
Sydney received a VMware Cloud on AWS region way before anybody else in APJ, and Ulander said it was simply because that's where the opportunity is.
"HP has actually done everything around their cloud stuff in Australia, it comes back to the fact the groups figured out how to use technology to build their business in Sydney," he added.
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"Australia also has such a strong government push to engage in these next-generation technologies."
Drawing from his experience in previous roles before he landed at VMware, Ulander said that some of the work he did with the likes of Melbourne's RMIT was all government funded.
"There's so much money into driving this technology adoption in public sector as well private industry ... we didn't have to deal with the cultural changes," he explained.
"For us, whether it's in the Americas or Europe, the cultural shift of thinking about technology not just as technology -- it's a little harder as they have more established ways of doing things ... especially in the networking side."
According to Ulander, many parts of the world look at things once set up as something that shouldn't be touched, and said Australia generally doesn't have that problem.
"You have more of a 'Hey let's do this better' attitude; between Australia and New Zealand there's just that exploratory let's check it out way," he added. "So whether that's the strategic insight into really leveraging technology for business benefit, or if it's the curiosity of saying how do we change, how do we get better."
Disclosure: Asha Barbaschow travelled as a guest of VMware to VMworld in Las Vegas
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