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Alan Bennett, vice president of enterprise business services for HP, said that the DSD had come up with 51 separate issues that agencies needed to consider when pondering a move to the cloud. He claimed HP's G-cloud addressed all 51 issues.
He added that the HP service had been designed; 'To support the (government's) compact with the citizen' while still allowing governments of all stripes to benefit from the elasticity and economics associated with cloud computing. He acknowledged that initially it was the smaller Government agencies with IT budgets of $5-$20 million which were most likely to adopt HP's GSCS.
Bigger agencies he acknowledged probably 'have the capacity to go down their own cloud route - but at some stage they will need to bridge to the public cloud,' via a secure route. Clearly HP is hoping it can provide that bridge.
Nick Bellamy, lead on government and defence enterprise services for HP, explained that the service would start with a focus on Infrastructure as a Service, with only one Software as a Service offering (Microsoft SharePoint). But he said that the cloud would be built out over the next two to three years.
The GSCS will feature a self-service portal and will charge on a per server, per terabyte basis with volume discounting available. Pricing will also be based on the contract duration and service level agreements required.
Initially clients will be locked into 90 day terms, but Mr Bennett said that 'the intent is not to have five year lock-ins.'
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HP however will remain hostage to the grinding pace of government decision making. Mr Bennett acknowledged that while it might in theory take only six or seven minutes to provision a new server using GSCS he noted 'It could take six or seven weeks' for individual departments or users to gain approval to use the cloud.
He was hopeful though that eventually, just as it might take three or four days to have a government travel request approved, it might take a few days for a government user to get the green light for adopting a cloud service.
Kevin Noonan, a Canberra based research director for Ovum, said he believed 2011/12 would prove a tipping point year for cloud to percolate into the public sector.
He said in the past governments both Federal and State had been held back over concerns to do with data sovereignty; service level agreements; the ability to negotiate contracts to include provisioning approval; cloud security standards and auditability. There had also been concerns about network security and the 'robustness of the value proposition.'
These issues were now starting to be addressed he said and 'Given the amount of activity'¦it is no longer reasonable to claim the cloud is just hype.'
Initially the HP GSCS will operate out of servers located in Global Switch's data centre in Sydney, but early next year HP plans to bring its new data centre being built at Eastern Creek online to share the G-cloud processing.
