Dutch financial services group, ING has publically acknowledged that it has teamed with HP and Colt as its primary partners on a plan to build cloud data centres.

Steve Van Wyk, CIO of ING is quoted by Bank Technology News and information management as saying "We've come to the realization that building out our own data centres is a thing of the past, it's a waste of time and energy to build out the brick and mortar of the data center,"  The plan is that ING will be the anchor tenants in the centres and other companies – notably financial institutions - will be targeted to join.

The plan is that Colt will build the data centre facility and the constituent modular units and HP has been asked to consolidate existing ING technology nfrastructure and applications into a hybrid cloud setting using HP Cloud Computing Solutions.

Information Management reported that ING originally purchased land in the Netherlands and in Belgium on which it planned to build its own data centres. "We started down that path, then we realized we really needed to find a partnership," Van Wyk says. In its broader data centre strategy, ING is consolidating 16 data centres four data centres by 2014 and ultimately to two data centres.