Brisbane-based Cloud Plus returns to the CRN Fast50 top 10 after a year of developing new services and nailing down its channel partnerships.
It’s been a successful five years since chief executive Jules Rumsey founded Cloud Plus in 2010. He had identified a gap for cloud services in the market left by a consolidated telco industry. “I always had a really strong view on having solid long-term growth, something that could go the distance.”
Before starting Cloud Plus, Rumsey was chief executive of private cloud provider Telarus, before deciding to get out of traditional IT altogether. “I was servicing a lot of legacy systems around voice and data security. When Cloud Plus came along, part of the focus was avoiding legacy, basically avoiding anything not associated with cloud.”
An emphasis on innovation has clearly paid off for Cloud Plus, which grew 114.41 percent this year to crack $4.4 million. The latest of these innovations is a managed firewall and security bundle.
“We’d found that clients would often opt to run with the base features of managed firewall and that really didn’t offer them adequate protection. So we created an attractively priced bundle that included the ability to enable anti-virus, anti-spam, intrusion prevention, content filtering and remote access VPN capabilities, and made that our main offering,” says Rumsey. This managed firewall service now features in 80 percent of Cloud Plus’ solutions.
Cloud Plus has made an effort to closely align with the channel, and now maintains 100 percent of its sales through the channel. It boasts more than 65 active channel partners in Australia.
In the past year, the business has expanded into Asia, establishing its own support centre in Manila. Cloud Plus already has an established presence in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, with 80 percent of its revenue coming from SMB and midmarket customers. “We didn’t want to use an outsourcer, it wouldn’t produce the results we wanted,” says Rumsey. “There’s a strong service ethic here and we’d rather hire our own people rather than hand control over to another team.”
Rumsey has set a lofty target of reaching $50 million in revenue by 2020, a goal he expects to achieve through a mix of organic growth and yet-to-be announced acquisitions. “We will be doing more in terms of backup and disaster recovery to better support a number of use cases that we have been talking to partners about. Beyond that, we will generally be sticking to our strategy and our core principals, which have served us very well to date.”
FACT FILE
- Founded 2010
- Key executive Jules Rumsey(chief executive)
- HQ Brisbane
- Growth 114.41%
- 2015 revenue $4.4 million
- Top vendors Telstra, AAPT, NextDC
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