Cloud Plus boss Jules Rumsey will move to the Czech Republic at the end of next month to head up the Brisbane-based business’ first European office, in a move to capture specialist skills in short supply in Australia.
Following the company’s Manila office coming online in January 2017, the private cloud firm is in the process of setting up its Prague office, with Rumsey and his family set to make the shift at the end of August.
The international offices will deliver an engineering and technical staffing boost, the likes of which Rumsey said was increasingly difficult to affordably and reliably find down under.
“Part of the driver around us setting up these overseas offices is that the market here, in terms of talent, is pretty tapped out,” he told CRN.
“Because of all the industry consolidation and the growth that's back on, we're back to pre-tech crash growth rules. Any talent that was available in the market, in one of the key areas that we're trying to hire in, was taken. People are happy to pay a premium in order to be able to secure and retain people, and it makes it very challenging to be able to hire the staff you need, when you need them, at a remotely reasonable cost.”
Rumsey said the initial scarcity factor was somewhat alleviated with the opening of the Manila office, where successful hires were made with people familiar with Australian telcos, clients and the lay of the business land.
But the managing director said finding higher-tier engineering talent was just as challenging, if not more so, than it was here, and the company had to look further afield.
“Ultimately, we came upon Eastern Europe as a good target area for us, a wealth of high-tier engineering skills across a range of different sorts of areas in Eastern Europe,” he said.
“Then it was really just a matter of deciding on which country we felt was most appropriate for us to be operating in, which came down to political stability, financial stability, a nice, safe city where if we had staff going backwards and forwards from other offices that we'd feel comfortable with it, and it was a place that, arguably, they'd want to visit.”
On comparing the Australian market to Europe and the experience available, Rumsey says the maturity of the cloud services available in Australia is very good, but the that clients and speed at which service is delivered and improved in Eastern Europe was on a different scale.
“We're interviewing guys where you say, ‘okay, can you talk to me about one of your larger clients?’. And they'll say, ‘Yeah, they've got a VMware environment with 900 hosts or 2000 hosts’. We're not even talking about the number of virtual machines, we're talking about the number of physical hosts that they've got in the environment,” he said.
“Some of the tools and the capabilities that these guys have been dealing with outstrips what we've seen here traditionally, and it's not to say that we don't have some of those capabilities here but, again, they're a lot rarer, they're a lot more expensive and when you're trying to move quickly, build to scale, transform your business, you really want to be able to have those sort of resources on tap.”
Of the initiatives a bolstered engineering and technical specialist team will be able to deliver to Cloud Plus, Rumsey said there were numerous projects and technologies the company wanted to develop that otherwise would have been much more challenging to execute.
"There are lots of things we would have struggled with if we hadn't had done Manila, let alone looked further ashore to places like Prague, and I think it's only going to get harder,” he said.
“The skill shortage here is significant but it's growing. There aren't enough new trained people coming through. It seems the Y-geners and the millennials aren't as interested in doing this sort of work as we might have been, and they certainly think differently, which can create a lot of challenges.
“We're in a position where we need to move quickly, we're trying to secure our position, secure market share, build scale, we can't afford to second guess and we can't afford to be in a position where we need to go and hire half-a-dozen people and we can't get them.”
Cloud Plus has seen strong growth in recent years, ranking 25 in the 2016 CRN Fast50 after it grew 46 percent to hit revenue of $6.56 million. The previous year the company held sixth place with 114.41 percent growth and $4.4 million in revenue. The company achieved a number four finish in 2013 with 191.51 percent growth.
Rumsey said he expects the new international offices, as well as a recently completed new head office in Brisbane that’s “kitted out for growth”.
“Every year [revenue increase] seems to go up in real dollar terms but the percentage drops slightly. Arguably, what we want to do is to get it so we can spike that growth a bit more and there's a lot that's happening behind the scenes to be able to facilitate that,” he said.
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