Verizon Terremark is considering whether or not to deploy its first cloud infrastructure node in Australia.
The company currently has a single "cloud-enabled data centre" for the Asia Pacific region in Hong Kong, though the broader Verizon business has five data centres across Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne.
Asia Pacific head of IT consulting and complex solutions, Lee Field, told iTnews that all five centres were conducive to being fitted out as cloud nodes, owing to several of the facilities housing infrastructure that is already "borderline cloud in size and nature".
"Some of the services we already provide look and feel very similar to cloud," Field said. "It's not a huge leap from where we are now to look at deploying [an Australian Terremark node]."
However, the company is still looking for a clearer indication of the level of custom that might await a local node, before making the leap.
"When we talk to our customers there's an incredible — I wouldn't say demand at this point — but an incredible interest around leveraging cloud," Asia Pacific regional vice president David Kim said.
Verizon is yet to decide which market it would want to pursue with locally-hosted Terremark services.
"The first question is, 'Do we look at government or do we look at commercial [such as financial services]?'," he said. "I think that's a really big, really valid question."
Though more favourable language on cloud adoption has been creeping into government procurement strategies, there remains a lack of clarity on what it means — and Kim confirmed that Verizon would want to see more certainty in the dialogue before pressing ahead with a cloud node, for example, in one of its Canberra data centres.
"It's fair to say over the last few weeks we've had teams of people down in Canberra from all over the place reviewing and looking at how that would work," Lee added.
Another consideration for Verizon is that it is on the cusp of launching a new version of its cloud compute platform in about a fortnight at the Interop technology show in New York.
Exact details of what is to be announced remain unclear, though Lee indicated the new cloud delivery model could mean "physical locations in terms of which data centre it's in becomes less and less relevant".
Verizon bought Terremark for US$1.4 billion in January 2011. Its present cloud compute products include a vCloud express platform for on-demand compute capacity, as well as private cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service products.