Empired named exclusive local agent for Cloupia

Listed Australian integrator Empired (ASX: EPD) was granted an exclusive licence in Australia to sell cloud automation and management software from US company Cloupia.

Empired managing director Russell Baskerville said that Cloupia would augment its Flexscale cloud offering with a browsable service catalogue for immediate provisioning of virtual data management, server and application management services.

Empired would provide customers cloud automation such as self service, orchestration, lifecycle management, provisioning and chargeback from an interface.

“While we had the potential to create a successful cloud solution with our current partners, Cloupia completes a critical piece of the service,” said Empired managing director Russell Baskerville.

“The value proposition from this partnership will ensure Empired is strategically placed to participate in and benefit from this rapidly growing technology trend and will ensure Empired continues to drive revenue and earnings growth.”

Cloupia’s solution integrated with physical infrastructure such as Cisco’s UCS computing platform, NetApp unified storage and virtualisation such as VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Redhat KVM. And it had a self-service portal, multi-tenant security, continuous monitoring and policy-driven provisioning.

Empired’s chief technology officer Greg Leach said the reseller with offices in Perth and Victoria, had big Australian organisations on the books, including Main Roads Western Australia and resources giant MMG. It also provided technology to the Victorian State Government’s department for education and early childhood development and WA Police. 

“We have a fairly big pipeline of opportunity in WA and Victoria,” Leach said.

“Large organisations are assessing how it [cloud services] fits their business.” 

Empired is talking to government, resources and utilities companies.

Cloupia vice president of marketing Bhaskar Krishnamsetty said Empired would help it drive sales in Australian.

“Their [Empired’s] agility and customer focus are a natural fit to our sales model,” he said.

“We strongly believe that Empired will provide the right cloud strategy and implementation based on customers' readiness and existing capabilities.”

Empired offered management, managed services and desktop services in Australia and Asia. It had about 220 staff and turned over roughly $40 million a year.