X
Business

BlackBerry datacentre could hit Oz

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is considering establishing an Australian datacentre as it continues efforts to upgrade its infrastructure reliability across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.
Written by Suzanne Tindal, Contributor

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is considering establishing an Australian datacentre as it continues efforts to upgrade its infrastructure reliability across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

Paul Donovan

RIM CIO Robin Bienfait (Credit: RIM)

Speaking with ZDNet.com.au this week, the company's chief information officer Robin Bienfait said she had improved the reliability of the company's network from 99 per cent when she started in 2007 to 99.7 per cent currently. She is now pushing to reach 99.99 per cent.

For the Asia-Pacific region, with its lower levels of network connectivity and distributed geography, this will mean landing datacentres in countries and allowing resident businesses and browsing sites to actually connect to them. This would help latency, application adoption and performance, according to the executive.

Before this happens, however, RIM's architecture needs to undergo a change, since until now it has worked off a single database construct for the region.

"For me to go into Singapore or into Australia, I have to break that database construct up: that's what's being developed. Our data application is changing," Bienfait said.

The testing of the new architecture construct will be undertaken in June or July and Bienfait believed it would be deployable by the end of the year, at which point she would start picking sites for deployment, depending on economics and performance.

Although Bienfait could not specify which sites she had been considering for datacentres, she did say that Australia stood in a good position.

"If we see a real demand from the marketplace, which we are seeing (that's why we've got an office here) then you can almost conclude you're going to be here," she said.

Having datacentre operations in Australia would mean running a lot of processes and the teams to support them. "It's a good thing for any economy," Bienfait said.

RIM has already been expanding in Australia, opening an office in North Sydney early last month to service its customers in Australia and New Zealand.

Editorial standards