World's third-largest hosting provider OVH opens Melbourne office

French cloud infrastructure provider OVH has opened its first Asia-Pacific office in Melbourne.

OVH vice chairman Laurent Allard said: "The ability to recruit top talent in the Victorian market was a key driver in selecting Melbourne for our headquarters, which we believe will support our company’s growth."

OVH was established in 1999 and claims to be the third largest infrastructure provider in the world based on physical servers. The cloud company has 1600 employees spread across 19 countries. OVH operates a total of 20 data centres.

The company revealed it was coming to Australia in October last year, setting up shop in Equinix's Sydney data center and announcing plans for the Melbourne office.

The local office will create 80 local jobs in roles including cloud sales rep, solution architect and technical account manager, according to OVH.

OVH is also on the lookout for a data centre IT technician to be based in Sydney.

In December last year, OVH opened three data centres in Germany and plans another 13 to go up by 2018.

The Minister for Small Business, Innovation and Trade Philip Dalidakis said: "This investment by one of Europe’s major cloud companies reinforces Melbourne’s position as the tech capital of Australia and means more jobs for Victoria.

"We warmly welcome OVH and will continue to work closely with them as they grow their business in Australia and across the Asia Pacific region."

OVH will also launch its through its Digital Launch Pad program for startups, which offers a range of free resources to successful applicants, including cloud infrastructure support worth up to $100,000.