Canberra-based cloud provider's aggressive national expansion

Cloud solutions provider CloudCentral has commenced an aggressive national expansion, expanding its partnership with NextDC and forging a new relationship with Equinix.

The company currently operates out of NextDC and TransACT data centres in Canberra – the new partnerships give will add an additional five data centres.

The company's flagship offering is "cloud in a box", which chief executive Kristoffer Sheather describes as "fully converged cloud infrastructure in a rack with everything partners need to deploy cloud in either their data centre or one of our data centres".

Sheather said the company used self-raised capital for the expansion. "We established a board of directors and an advisory board and each member has contributed their own personal funds.

"We've attracted a reasonable amount of capital and we're looking to raise even more."

The company will operate sites out of NextDC's Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane data centres, in addition to an Equinix data centre in Sydney. This brings the company's total footprint to seven data centres.

"Over the next 12 months, we're going to open an office in each state we have a data centre in. Our partners can meet with solution architects from our company, develop solution proposals and end-costings for their customers," Sheather said.

CloudCentral was established in 2009 and Sheather told CRN the company already has a base of 200 customers.

"As a percentage of our current base, 75 percent are service providers, 10 percent are government and the remainder are SMBs."

Sheather said the company is looking at "opportunities to acquire other cloud-oriented businesses to help build our customer base and volume".

Expanding its data centre footprint provides existing CloudCentral customers with a number of advantages, Sheather said.

"We will be able to offer them lower latency as they can choose to access their data from the point of presence closest to their location. It will also benefit large national companies who want staff working from multiple locations to have rapid access to all of their information."

CloudCentral isn't the only customer NextDC has signed recently. Last week Dimension Data announced it added four new data centre sites, one of which is in NextDC's Melbourne data centre.

CloudCentral will commence rolling out its cloud infrastructure throughout 2013 and 2014.