rhipe’s public cloud margins rise above private clouds

Cloud distie rhipe has revealed that margin contribution from public cloud has topped the contribution made by what CEO Dominic O’Hanlon described as “traditional Microsoft public cloud offerings”.

Office 365 appears to be the driver of the shift, as the company has released a new ASX statement [PDF] that explained “Office 365 seat count has increased by more than 170,000 or 65 percent since the start of the financial year.”

Those new sales take the company’s total O365 seat count to 530,000, of which around 100,000 are academic seats.

Most of the growth – around 60 percent  – has come in  Australia, and the rest in the Asian markets in which rhipe operates.

rhipe was last week named Microsoft’s Malaysian Partner of the Year and O’Hanlon said that award, and the growth in O365 sales, “is a reflection of rhipe’s exceptional year of growth.”