The fight to win over business customers in the Asia-Pacific cloud market is set to become fiercer with vCloud Air’s foray into Australia and Japan.
Earlier this week, virtualisation software company VMware said it has teamed up with Telstra to offer the vCloud Air public cloud service in Australia by the first half of next year.
vCloud Air, currently available in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, lets businesses extend their existing VMware virtual machines (VMs) to the public cloud in a hybrid cloud setting, or spin up new VMs directly in the cloud.
Large enterprises typically do so to beef up their computing resources during peak business periods or comply with data protection laws that require data to be stored within a country.
While the vCloud Air service will be compelling to enterprises that have invested in VMware software, more companies are also craving for an easy way to move computing workloads across different cloud services, regardless of the virtualisation technology in use.
This is currently being looked into by the Open Data Centre Alliance, which is driving open cloud standards and promoting interoperability between cloud services.
Meanwhile, telcos are the biggest beneficiaries of the tussle among cloud service providers to compete for business. Telstra, for one, has also partnered Cisco and Microsoft to offer more choices for customers.
While Telstra operates data centres in other countries such as Singapore, VMware’s Asia-Pacific senior vice president and general manager Sanjay Mirchandani said the scope of the partnership is limited to Telstra’s home market in Australia.
In the coming weeks, vCloud Air will also available in Japan through Softbank. This follows a successful beta programme involving more than 50 companies.
