Cloud Strategy

Working with Cisco, Diggit has defined its overall strategy as delivery of private cloud functionality to support collaboration and desktop services, as illustrated in Figure A-3. It has chosen to offload the development and test environments to a third-party provider, ABCNet, as this offers a far more flexible and, more importantly, a cost-effective way of managing these areas and to offload its customer relationship management and sales tools to Salesforce.com. This will allow Diggit’s development and sales engineers to focus more on the High Performance Compute (HPC) and telemetry services that are actually systems of differentiation, whereas the sales tools are not. Remote clouds will be deployed that are built around a pod that can be deployed into any mine or research location. These remote clouds will offer a subset of IT services, namely, VDI and telemetry services. The HPC solution is too mission critical, so it will remain a technology island until the cloud has established a level of maturity that the business is happy with; then an HPC can be migrated into the private cloud. All services will be ordered through an internal, centralized portal and catalogue and the cloud broker, a component of the Diggit cloud platform, will be used to provide service transparency and implement business logic.

Figure A-3. Diggit Cloud Strategy

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