Born-in-the-cloud partner to go global after rampant growth

Kloud is launching exploratory trips to Asia with the plan to open its first regional office this financial year.

The Melbourne-headquartered company, which is a born-in-the-cloud Microsoft partner, detailed the expansion plans to CRN – while also revealing its stellar growth.

The company was only founded three-and-a-half years ago and has already ballooned to 130 staff, with 90 staff in the HQ, another 30 in Sydney and 10 in Adelaide.

Director Geoff Rohrsheim, who co-founded Kloud after selling his Microsoft practice Strategic Data Management to ASX-listed DWS in 2008, told CRN that Kloud had watched its revenue go from $2 million to $10 million to currently sit around $20 million – and hoping to tip $35 million at the end of this financial year.

Kloud's NSW state business manager, Damian Coyne, who joined from Microsoft in July 2012, told CRN: "Australia is a relatively mature market, but other regions in Asia – Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam – they are struggling with the concept of cloud.

"There are not a lot of organisations that have started there [oin Asia] to help customers get to the cloud. Those regions need organisations like Kloud to help them on that journey," he added.

Global partnership

Kloud is already working with some global clients, after striking an alliance with two Microsoft partners in other countries.

While Coyne could not reveal specific details, he said: "We have a large global publishing business that have pulled together and made a decision to reduce their infrastructure footprint on-premise by 60 percent over the next five years.

"However, there are no true global providers that specialise in Azure or AWS that can help get them there and deliver a consistent model across regions. So we are working with that customer and two other Microsoft partners who are non-competitive with Kloud to pull together a common program to get them into the Microsoft cloud."

Rohrsheim said the main driver for clients was the need to reduce data. "They're struggling to keep up on-premise. Physically, data centres fill up, but the public cloud doesn't have a limit."

The company is also kicking plenty of goals in its home country. Rohrsheim revealed that Kloud has moved 1.3 million users to Office 365 in Australia, which he claimed was "the most by far" of any local Microsoft partner.

Customers wins have included the likes of Seek, Caltex and Coles. Kloud also helped the University of Sydney transition more than 419,000 mailboxes to Office 365.