Aussie cloud play gets set for Silicon Valley

Local cloud startup OrionVM plans to expand its operation to Silicon Valley after just two years in business.

OrionVM is the product of three university students claiming to possess the world’s fastest IaaS platform. The service launched in 2010 with three full-time staff and a network of contributors, and recently benefited from a cash injection by computing pioneer Gordon Bell and serial start-up founder Stephen Baxter.

It has been named as a customer of Equinix’s expanded Sydney data centre, due to go live in September.

OrionVM now has eight full-time and two part-time employees, with plans to hire at least another two full-time in the coming months. 

Managing director Sheng Yeo told CRN OrionVM’s 2012 revenue growth has been between 40 and 45 percent month-on-month. He declined to provide financial details.

While its overall market share was small, OrionVM’s revenue, partner base and customer list was growing, he said.

The company currently works with 14 partners, ranging from systems integrators to managed service providers, and plans to have signed over 100 by this time next year, thanks to the launch of a dedicated partner program.

“Over the past few months we have seen an increase in understanding about what the cloud can do, and as this understanding has grown it has led to an ever-increasing demand for partnerships,” Yeo said.

“Most of our partners previously had arrangements with hardware vendors, but now are choosing to use a cloud offering and one package rather than managing the servers themselves when it isn't their key business.”

The growing list of partners, including the likes of Adlibre, ITGenius and FirstFocus, has helped OrionVM score some significant clients. ASX-listed financial services company Firstfolio and Sensis subsidiary Quotify have both signed up for OrionVM’s cloud services. 

Yeo revealed to CRN several government departments will soon be announced as customers, but declined to provide further details. 

L to R: Joseph Glanville, Alex Sharp, Sheng Yeo

OrionVM sells hosting directly to customers but partner relationships are becoming more important as it looks to promote its CloudDC offering to a wider global audience.

The company's inaugural partner program forms part of OrionVM’s plan to be in Silicon Valley by the end of the year. The company is selective about who it chooses to partner with, and Yeo stressed the program is not a reseller or affiliate arrangement.

“The aim of the program is to work with partners to deliver anything up the technology stack that OrionVM doesn't currently deliver,” he said. “This program targets and allows only companies that will add value by either packaging the infrastructure into another service offering or adding a solution on top.”

Currently a small fish in a very large pond, Yeo believes OrionVM’s strategy of not competing with partners over the technology stack will lure potential partners over from global rivals such as Amazon.

“We will not undercut our partners nor will we, ourselves, move up the technology stack,” Yeo said. “We know what we are good at; building robust, reliable, highly scalable, high performance cloud infrastructure.”

OrionVM will introduce new features to CloudDC as well as a possible platform upgrade over the coming year.