SYDNEY – IBM says its new production-grade cloud platform SmartCloud Enterprise+ (SCE+) is now available and fully operational in Australia.
The SCE+ platform will be hosted at IBM’s datacentre in Baulkham Hills, Sydney. It’s IBM’s seventh cloud centre globally to date, and the first to operate and serve SCE+ in the Asia-Pacific region, Big Blue says.

It’s said to offer enterprise-class managed cloud services, and act as an IBM hub for Asia-Pacific, but especially for Australia and New Zealand. It will operate on a pay-by-the-month subscription basis and is said to be suitable for organisations deploying between 10 and 500 virtual machines.

IBM Australia cloud computing executive Dean Evans told Australian IT that the company’s investment into the local SCE+ project was in the “millions of dollars”.

The new offering builds on IBM’s public SmartCloud Enterprise service, which is believed to have close to 50 customers in Australia, including a number of software vendors and a major airline – which is not Qantas, according to IBM executives.

“We believe SCE+ addresses both a solution and platform gap that currently exists in the cloud market within this region. Particularly in Australia and New Zealand, there is both a readiness and need to move away from components and infrastructure and towards shared platforms and software,” said Evans.