Cloud giants eyeballing Canberra

“We are doing cloud computing evaluations with governments in Australia” - Google

Cloud computing giants Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have both held recent meetings with State and Federal chief information officers, who they say are increasingly receptive to the idea of adopting public cloud computing services.

In recent conversations with Government Technology Review, both companies said they are receiving a warm reception when they visit Canberra and state capitals.

“We are doing evaluations with governments in Australia,” said Doug Farber, Director of Enterprise for Google Asia Pacific. “A lot of the more enlightened CIOs at the pointy end of the adoption curve are interested.”

One of the ways Google is attracting users to its hosted applications, which include a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation graphics program and the Wave collaboration too, is by varying its contracts to make it easier for government to adopt the services. The company can already point to one major public sector client - the NSW Department of Education and Training (see page 22) - as proof of concept for its willingness to adapt its services to the needs of government customers.

“We try to be as flexible as we can on terms and conditions,” Farber said during an interview with Government Technology Review.

AWS, meanwhile, has also conducted discussions with Australian governments in the hope they adopt its cloud infrastructure services, such as the S3 cloud storage offering.

“We’ve talked to the Federal Government and they are very excited about the cloud coming here,” said Andy Jassy, a Global Vice-President at AWS. “We have also spent some time meeting the NSW government and were impressed by the conversation,” he said. Intriguingly, “here” in the context of Jassy’s remarks was Singapore, as he spoke to Government Technology Review on the occasion of the company’s opening of a new data centre in the city state.

Jassy’s comments could therefore indicate a softening in governments’ preference for data to reside in Australia in order to avoid the chance of foreign governments accessing sensitive data.

Both companies also make compelling cases for cloud computing and their role in its future.

Google’s Farber asked Government Technology Review to identify the last great desktop application, and suggested all recent innovation has come in online applications.

AWS’s Jassy meanwhile, said he believes the dominant cloud providers will not emerge from the high-margin world of enterprise software. “We see cloud will be a high-volume, low-margin business,” Jassy said. “Who do you think is good at that,” he asked, alluding to Amazon’s roots in online retailing. “When you work in that kind of environment, you think about it [delivering cloud services] differently.”