Swish's little ray of Sun-shine

Victorian Internet services company, The Swish Group, has formed a partnership with Sun Microsystems which will see it become a Sun value added reseller.

Swish will use Sun's Unix servers to provide Web site and applications hosting, and network integration services to its customers. The new partnership will complement its roles of Cisco Certified Premier Partner, Microsoft Certified Solution Provider, Citrix Solutions Network Member and Macromedia Solutions Partner.

The announcement was made at the opening of Swish's new premises in Melbourne, which houses a data centre, training centre, and facilities for systems integration and multimedia development. Besides Sun's servers, the data centre also uses Cisco's networks and Dell's Intel servers.

The data centre also has an Internet bandwidth of 255 megabits per second (mbps) via a 155 mbps link to Optus, and a 100 mbps link to Connect.com, said Wayne Rankin, CEO of Swish. "The data centre offers more bandwidth than any non-telco operated data centre in Australia," said Rankin.

The company's new premises is located at the De Bono Centre, which is being developed by the Victorian Government as a centre for innovation and technology commercialisation.

"We've got some extraordinary success stories in IT and innovation in Victoria, but perhaps they are not always as well packaged and focused as they could have been.

For companies of the same calibre as Swish, to enable that focus in a single location is not only good for those companies, but very positive for our state as a whole, said John Brumby, the Victorian minister for State and Regional Development who officially opened the new Swish premises.

Brumby said e-commerce is expected to drive real economic growth of 2.7 per cent in Victoria by 2007. "That is a growth of almost half a percentage point every year driven by e-commerce, e-purchasing and e-efficiencies."