Published on the 15/11/2023 | Written by Newsdesk

Oracle IaaS, PaaS claim Kiwi ‘first’…

Oracle is teaming up with Kiwi managed service provider and information management specialist Team IM in what it says is New Zealand’s first locally owned and operated hyperscale cloud.

The move sees Oracle join the increasingly busy Kiwi cloud party – albeit, somewhat belatedly, and via a local partner, rather than its own build and the hefty investment required there. Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google have already announced their own local cloud regions in New Zealand, opting to build their own data centres here, while local self-proclaimed hyperscale provider Catalyst Cloud may take some exception to Oracle’s ‘first’ tag.

“Team IM will bring the benefits of Oracle Cloud delivered by a locally owned and operated company.”

Team Cloud, which will run independently across two Team IM data centres in the North Island, will run on Oracle Alloy and offer more than 100 Oracle cloud infrastructure services. Alloy is Oracle’s global strategy to enable its partners to manage and operate the Oracle Cloud locally.

Team IM has been a long term Oracle Gold partner and currently offers Oracle-based workloads on both Oracle Cloud in Australia and other hyperscalers in Australia.

Ian Rogers, Team IM chief executive, told iStart he hopes to have Team Cloud commissioned by mid-2024.

“Team IM has been an Oracle Gold partner for years and currently supports and markets Oracle based workloads on both Oracle Cloud in Australia and other hyper scalers in Australia.

“It was the ability to run these workloads in New Zealand, by Team IM, to provide our customers with better commercials and performance, in carbon neutral data centres, and extend these factors to other New Zealand based customers that helped Team IM to select Oracle Alloy.”

Rogers says local organisations are increasingly eager to harness the power of the cloud while safeguarding the integrity of their data within their own shores by leveraging a unique hyperscale cloud solution.

“Oracle Cloud, which Team Cloud is based on, will provide the same number of IaaS and PaaS services as is available from the Oracle Public Cloud overseas,” he says.

“Oracle’s price/performance ratio is very competitive compared to other hyperscalers, data egress fees are very low, there are SLA’s for performance in addition to availability and customers can use encryption keys to keep their NZ located data very secure.”

The company will initially be providing a private enterprise cloud for IaaS and PaaS aimed at public sector, all commercial sectors and iwi organisations.

“Essentially any organisation that wishes to move their applications from on-premise to cloud or from other clouds to Team Cloud in New Zealand,” he says.

GPUs for AI will be available in the future, depending on demand, with Team Cloud also hoping to offer Oracle SaaS applications in the future.

Oracle will provide and maintain the platform, while Team IM will deliver the services and hold the customer relationship. Rogers says the sales, marketing and engineering teams of both companies will collaborate ‘but that does not prevent Team IM from working with partners and other managed service providers or cloud services providers’.

Rogers says Team IM, which has a wholly-owned subsidiary in Australia, intends to support the cloud locally and invest into developing local talent to run Team Cloud.

He says the company is making ‘considerable’ investment in people, premises and training – with plans to increase the number of jobs by ‘at least 500 percent’, all of whom will be New Zealand-based, across Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

The company is also investing in tertiary scholarships to encourage young people into the sector.

“We will expand our graduate recruitment programme with Victoria University and introduce the same for Auckland and Canterbury,” he says.

“Our vision is to train and recruit local talent and only recruit from overseas for specialist roles,” he says.

Existing staff view the move as ‘a huge career opportunity’ Rogers says.

He says the announcement marks a significant milestone for Team IM – formed when Team Asparona and Team Informatics united in 2020 –  as it transforms from a managed services provider to a cloud services providers.

“This provides another hyperscaler to the New Zealand market and more choice for organisations,” he says. “Team IM will bring the benefits of Oracle Cloud delivered by a locally owned and operated company.

“Microsoft and Oracle have also announced some key initiatives which Team IM will be able to bring to New Zealand,” he adds.

AWS’s cloud region is also expected to open in 2024.

Microsoft, was granted consent from the OIC to purchase a third package of land for its $180m data centre with Fonterra, BNZ and Auckland Transport among the names already signed to migrate to the new data centre region. Google is expected to use another provider’s facilities for its local cloud region, based in Auckland.

CDC Data Centres opened its first two hyperscale data centres in Auckland’s Silverdale and Hobsonville last year.