Aussie skills are winning foreign business

Aussie skills are winning foreign business

By Rodney Appleyard

Mar 16, 2005: Despite last year's criticism over Telstra and constant outcries over off shoring services to other countries, such as India, Australia is now emerging as a popular offshore base for some of the world's biggest companies from the U.S. and U.K.

Tim Smith, Hitachi Data Systems' marketing manager for the ANZ says that his company has noticed this trend start to emerge over the last six to nine months.

He says that companies are beginning to realise that Australia has some of the most skilful and well trained IT staff in the world, but the workers are also much cheaper to hire than those in the U.S. and U.K.

"Our workers have skills which are at the top of the game. Many major multi-national companies, which we cannot mention at the moment, apart from some are Fortune 500 companies, are in the process of migrating from the U.S. and U.K. to Australia.

"They are doing this because they want to reduce the cost of managing infrastructure of storage but they don't want to reduce the skill level needed to run these systems. They also don't want to offshore these services to places like India, because they are appropriate for handling services like call centres.

"However, now they are realising that by off shoring data management systems to Australia, they can keep information secure and well managed."

The companies, that cannot be mentioned yet, are using HDS' data migration services to ensure a smooth transition is made to Australia.

Smith says that the Hitachi Data System Storage Consolidation Migration Services transparently migrates information from disparate legacy storage subsystems into a single consolidated storage infrastructure.

HDS's inter-city data migration services help a company to relocate had offices interstate and cannot afford the downtime associated with a physical shutdown location.

And finally, HDS' inter-continental data migration services has the ability to undertake migrations services between countries.

Smith says that when Hitachi migrates data from country to country, it uses Telco software that clears the lines to make sure all the 1s and 0s pass through seamlessly.

The migrations are also done in manageable bite sizes to protect the migration against interruptions and the loss of integrity to the data.

These migrations are staggered over a period of time. For instance, one of the current migrations from the U.S. to Australia is scheduled to take 12 months to fully process eight terabytes of data from one country to the other.

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