The allegedly Confucian curse, “May you live in interesting times” is a blessing for the likes of Jules Rumsey, who is succeeding in transforming how businesses and government agencies consume IT.
He revels in government buying shake-ups upending incumbents as the public sector seeks productivity dividends to bring their budgets back under control. Rumsey says his home state’s “cloud first” strategy puts his CloudPlus in the box seat for opportunities.
Queensland’s push to drive down costs especially in hosted email, which it predicts will save $17 million a year, puts the screws to traditional box-droppers and systems integrators, Rumsey says.
“It’s having a significant impact for [our] partners but for us it can only be seen as a positive,” he says.
CloudPlus’ interesting channel model as a reseller to resellers has helped it transform from selling tin to leasing cloud to its end-customers. Rumsey says there’s an urgency among resellers as they realise their traditional business model is fast approaching its use-by date.
“Some partners have said they’re struggling because historically they were very focused on government business and it’s drying up and we need something to take to market very quickly.”
And it’s not just resellers knocking on CloudPlus’ door.
“One vendor approached us saying they needed to come up with a strategy to approach government business in Queensland, because they used to ship a lot of hardware to them but they can’t any more,” he says. CloudPlus will help the vendor – which Rumsey won’t name – develop managed services that resellers will take to government.
The unique position CloudPlus occupies – part reseller, part sub-distributor, on the verge of being a telco – is symptomatic of the “greying of the edges” as the channel moves to cloud services, he says.
CloudPlus also provides internet transit across its own multiprotocol labelling switching network and managed infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) that resellers white label as their own. It hosts in Equinix and NextDC data centres across the country, which enables a reseller to offer production environments close to their customers with disaster recovery in another state, for instance. This offers redundancy, and resellers can offer dedicated lines or failover pathways to their applications and data in the event of mishap – even over ADSL or wireless.
CloudPlus hit a milestone this year, signing its 25th partner and has plans to move beyond Queensland and Victoria to NSW and the Asia-Pacific.
Rumsey singles out the implementation it helped systems integrator Surety IT secure with marquee Queensland client, Bundaberg Brewed Drinks, as an example of the new business cloud enables. “[Bundaberg] had challenges with a major carrier around getting bandwidth at an effective price point,” Rumsey says. The FMCG brand had an EMC RecoverPoint implementation between offices in Bundaberg and Brisbane.
“Data replication requires a fair whack of bandwidth and trying to do that in parallel with production bandwidth is hard.
“One of the key benefits of dealing with us, for a channel partner, is we connect with major and boutique carriers, so we are quite disruptive.
“We delivered them significantly more bandwidth for less than they expected to pay. It helped out Surety, helped out EMC, and since then we’ve migrated the rest of their WAN services to us.”
FAST FACTS
Founded
2010
MD
Jules Rumsey
HQ
Brisbane, Qld
Growth
191.51%
Industries
SME, mid-market, enterprise and government resellers
Activities
Internet transit, IaaS, cloud service provision, information security, DR and backup, collo, product bundles
Staff
18
Vendors
Cisco, Fortinet, IBM, SuperMicro, EMC, VMware, Trend Micro, Veeam, Microsoft, Citrix
Disties
Whitegold, Westcon, Ingram Micro, Digicor, Newlease, Avnet
Data Centres
Equinix, NextDC
Carriers
Telstra, Optus, AAPT, Pipe, TPG, Vocus, Amcom, BigAir
URL
cloudplus.com
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