Macquarie Cloud Services sets up Azure practice

Macquarie Telecom’s cloud division has started a dedicated Azure practice to support Microsoft’s cloud computing customers in Australia.

Macquarie Cloud Services, as the division is called, will deliver Azure managed services to new and existing customers such as ITW Construction, Loanworks and Cura Software, which is leveraging Azure services in Australia as well as Europe and the US.

The new practice, led by Naran McClung, an experienced Microsoft specialist, is expected to complement Macquarie’s existing cloud, hosting, datacentre and telco businesses.

“Our undiluted focus on Azure represents ‘our answer’ to public cloud in Macquarie Cloud Services,” McClung told Computer Weekly. “Azure has quickly become a logical extension of what we do, and it’s now about the right workload or service for the right cloud – guided by our customers’ needs.

“We’re finding new hybrid opportunities every day, and our telecoms business is really embracing Azure and creating strong customer demand. We recently announced a world-first integration with the VeloCloud SD-WAN Virtual Edge into Azure, something my Azure team collaborated on with the telco business very closely,” he added.

McClung said Macquarie Cloud Services’ customers typically run a range of traditional applications, cloud infrastructure and databases, with backup and disaster recovery requirements across Australia and other regions.

The company is also seeing SAP and Azure VMware Solutions opportunities starting to mature. “As part of our standard managed services, we’ve helped a range of customers move off ‘classic’ Azure resources and migrate through to Azure Resource Manager,” McClung added.

McClung said the high uptake of Microsoft’s Office 365 has been an influential factor for driving Azure adoption among enterprise customers.

Also, for many of them, multi-cloud is “less about Azure coupled with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, and more about Azure, hybrid and a range of SaaS [software-as-a-service] providers and with a common identity play”, he added.

Australia’s cloud infrastructure market continues to boom, with spending expected to reach around A$1.2bn by 2022, according to research by technology analyst firm Telsyte. Around eight in 10 organisations have a strategic approach to cloud computing, while just one in four have mature practices to move workloads from on-premise to cloud.