Massive growth for Brisbane's Cloud Plus

Cloud Plus entered its first CRN Fast50 with a bullet, being named fourth with nearly 200 percent growth for the year to 30 June 2013. In the nine or so months since then, its operations have continued to ramp up. 

Jules Rumsey, Chief Executive Officer of the Brisbane-based private cloud provider, says his company is still seeing massive growth. “We have closed enough business to do 200 percent again this year. Now it just comes down to provisioning timeframes.”

Cloud Plus has grown its headcount, including the addition of former WhiteGold branch manager Brian Oostenbroek as its new channel account executive in Brisbane. He’ll help manage the firm’s burgeoning partner community, which has grown from 20 to 35 players in the past year. Geographic expansion is also on the cards, though Rumsey wouldn’t elaborate at time of writing. 

It has upped the ante in terms of reliability of service, with a significant investment in fibre capacity between the state capitals on the eastern seaboard. Rumsey won’t be drawn on the size of the investment, other than to say “it is not a small exercise”.

“We ended up deploying additional inter-capital fibre between our Brisbane and Sydney, and our Sydney and Melbourne sites, so we now have protected capacity based on four different geographic fibre paths from two different carriers. Vocus provide both a coastal path and an inland path, as do AAPT.”

This gives Cloud Plus a highly robust network that can withstand outages that would otherwise risk service levels and damage its relationships with its partners and clients. Cloud Plus is working with some major managed service providers, including past CRN Fast50 honourees.

“Considering the nature of the partners and clients we have, we need to avoid outages at all costs. We have some fairly large channel partners. Good examples are Thomas Duryea and Kiandra IT in Melbourne. They have large corporate and government clients and we can’t afford to have outages that impact them in the course of a day. They don’t tolerate it.”

One speed bump on the road to aggressive expansion is the time it takes to provision fibre services from its carrier partners. “Most of the services we provide have a network element to them. Where there are fibre services in the mix there is often a two- to three-month lead time, depending on who the carrier is and where the client site is,” says Rumsey.

For CBD clients, fibre services can be up and running inside of a month if the site is already fibred; for sites requiring a build and those in metro and regional areas a lead time of two or three months is more likely. “It is frustrating, obviously. You want everything to be like Megaport – log into the portal, order a virtual cross-connect and minutes later it is done.”