From Movember toward millions in a year

What started as a project managing AWS services for moustache-themed charity Movember is now on the way to becoming a multimillion-dollar business for Bulletproof.

The hosting provider today revealed that revenue from AWS services has grown to approximately 10 percent of its business, up from less than 1 percent a year ago.

With Bulletproof's AWS revenues reaching $837,000 in the first half of the 2014 financial year, the AWS business appears on track to becoming a multimillion-dollar operation this year.

The number of AWS customers at Bulletproof is growing by 15 percent a month.

AWS growth has helped drive a 16 percent increase in Bulletproof's revenue to $8.1 million for the first half of the 2014 financial year. The company is on track to grow year-on-year revenue by 31 percent.

The company recorded an underlying net loss of $229,000.

Underlying EBITDA was $965,000.

Growing the mo'

It's a significant result for Bulletproof's AWS business, which all began with its first significant AWS customer project for Movember back in 2012.

CEO Anthony Woodward said the charity had been a customer since 2007, and Bulletproof had already used AWS to support the global reach, but it wasn't until 2012 that the AWS partnership was formalised, with Movember the first significant customer project.

"I guess we could see there was a clear wave coming and we could see they had very good market lead in the US market," said Woodward. "And we'd identified even a couple of years prior to that that at some point in the future, large cloud service providers such as AWS would need to be part of the picture for us."

The timing was fortuitous. Woodward said the company formalised the AWS partnership in October that year – the following month, AWS launched physical presence here, with Bulletproof a launch partner.

Since then, Bulletproof has become the first Australian AWS premier consulting partner. Today's earnings result reports this status has led to "increased size of customer contract wins".

"I guess we could see it was a significant opportunity that had yet to be tested and we've been very pleasantly surprised by the success that it's had. As well as it generating a lot of revenue growth, it's a good cultural fit, " Woodward said.

"It was just a matter of identifying how we could add value to it. It's a completely unmanaged product, so there's a good range of opportunities for us to add value and help customers get onto cloud."

Yesterday's earnings announcement cited several customer wins, including Mazda, Bauer Media, Racing Victoria and Tennis Australia.