SAP to invest in Australian data centre and public sector partnerships
Mon 17 Nov 2014
SAP has announced its plans to invest AUD $150mn in building up partnerships with Australian authorities and establishing a data centre in Canberra.
The German tech giant revealed its pledge at a reception in Sydney today, attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel, following the G20 summit in Brisbane.
The investment plan spans the next five years and includes the creation of a new centre which will be known as the SAP Institute for Digital Government, as well as the new data centre facility to host its HANA Enterprise Cloud.
The Institute for Digital Governance is expected to recruit around 250 people locally, with positions for developers, solution architects and services professionals, said Damien Bueno, general manager of federal government and defence at SAP Australia & New Zealand.
Bueno suggested that the Institute, which is planned to open in the second quarter of 2015, would act as an “influencing vehicle” for SAP products within the public sector, helping governmental bodies advance their use of technology.
Following US and British governments, the Australian authorities announced in October that they would also be pushing departments to use cloud computing to cut costs and boost efficiency.
“We anticipate government addressing the under investment in ICT that has occurred over the last seven or eight years, and see some large programs on the horizon […] The decision to do this had its genesis in the late part of 2012, and our decision has been supported by recent government decisions regarding cloud,” said Bueno.
Kevin Noonan, public sector analyst at Ovum, described the announcement as a “big win” for Australian government:
“A digital community expects to interact with government in different ways, and this creates new opportunities to improve service delivery while continuing to drive cost savings.”
“This is a fundamental change and it is causing governments around the world to rethink key aspects of government administration,” Noonan added.
