Platform9 and Intersect Partner to Bring SaaS-powered Unified Cloud to Australia and New Zealand

SYDNEY, Australia and SUNNYVALE, California – 26 March 2019

Platform9 (platform9.com), the leader in SaaS-managed hybrid cloud, and research accelerator Intersect (intersect.org.au) today announced a strategic partnership to offer Platform9 hybrid cloud services throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Intersect is Australia’s largest full-service eResearch support agency, helping scientific, university and research institutes accelerate their impact through innovative technologies and expert advice for over a decade.

Platform9 is the industry’s only SaaS-managed Hybrid Cloud solution that enables organisations to centrally manage VMs, containers and serverless functions – on any infrastructure: on-premise, in the public cloud, or at the edge. Customers can simply ‘plug-in’ their different environments (spanning Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Dell VMWare, OpenStack, bare metal and more), and be up and running immediately with a unified cloud experience and single pane of glass across all workloads.

Platform9 eliminates the operational burden of managing modern infrastructure at scale by delivering it as a fully managed service. Critical operational capabilities — such as zero-touch upgrades, multi-cluster operations, high availability, monitoring, diagnostics, healing and more — are all handled automatically with a 99.9 percent SLA guarantee.

Leveraging Intersect’s experience in high performance and cloud computing, and Platform9’s unique offering, enterprises in Australia and New Zealand can overcome the challenges of cloud and containers adoption at scale. Enterprises can now more easily take advantage of cloud-native architectures and adopt new technologies (such as Kubernetes) to empower developers, release applications faster, and streamline operations – all while reducing overall data center and cloud costs.

Intersect has operated supercomputers on behalf of Australian universities since inception. It aggregates HPC demand across research organisations, and has a deep understanding of the mission-critical demands of all forms of computing-as-a-service. Intersect is a key provider of the ARDC National Research Cloud and delivers OpenStack infrastructure, service, support, engineering and consulting to research, science and higher-education sectors. The experience accumulated solving the complex challenges of these demanding, large-scale customers — for example GPU virtualisation, high speed interconnect, machine learning, and containerised applications — uniquely positions Intersect to serve an array of industries from health and medical to financial services, government, supply chain, engineering and more.

Intersect will supply and support Platform9 managed services – Managed OpenStack (for virtualisation), Kubernetes (for containers) and Fission.io (for serverless functions) in Australia and New Zealand with guaranteed SLAs, uptime, quotas, compliance and resource monitoring. Familiar local expert teams that solve national scale problems and high-end parallel software optimisation will augment Platform9’s global service delivery team of technical specialists, engineers and customer support representatives.

Western Sydney University Chief Information and Digital Officer, Kerry Holling, commented: “Western and Intersect have a long history of effective collaboration. Intersect technology and service already underpin the Western Research Cloud which supports the majority of our researchers and their projects. With an increasingly cloudy technical future and the transition to our Atlas cloud for non-research needs, I am excited about the synergies Intersect will deliver with commercial partners like Platform9 into the future.”

“This partnership delivers for Australian and New Zealand customers new and innovative services that dramatically decrease cloud time-to-market while improving efficiency, reducing cost and improving service experience–at scale. It delivers for researchers and large organisations by leveraging commercial technology that is consumed as-a-service freeing up precious capital from unsustainable DIY infrastructure. Lastly, it delivers for Intersect members by building technical bridges and reusability between science, research and industry,” concluded Bailey.