Australian Cloud Provider CloudCentral Acquires Dey Storage Systems

CloudCentral, provider of secure Australian cloud computing solutions has the potential to make the company a player in a market that’s been growing at a 36%  compound annual rate, following its acquisition of the intellectual property of US software start-up, DEY Storage Systems, Inc.

The agreement was announced by CloudCentral’s founder and CEO, Kristoffer Sheather, ahead of his firm’s reverse listing on the ASX in June. He said the agreement with DEY Storage Systems will introduce software-defined storage services to CloudCentral partners and develop new opportunities for the Australian cloud provider.

DEY Storage Systems raised $3 million of funding in 2012 to develop data center storage management software. The San Mateo, CA-based company was formed to provide storage solutions using a more open software delivered model. The software enables large data centre customers to buy high performance storage at lower costs than using traditional storage vendors. The model is similar to those methods used by Google, Amazon and Facebook to keep storage costs low whilst delivering the reliability, performance, scalability expected by enterprise and government customers.

This is a crucial addition to CloudCentral’s current storage offerings and introduces the software-defined storage business model, which separates ownership of hardware and software, allowing customers a wider choice of software vendors. CloudCentral builds and sells cloud computing infrastructure, along with offering maintenance and support services.

“We see this as a transformational deal from both a technology and investment perspective. The addition of software-defined storage services eliminates the need to pay third parties for storage and gives us more control over the future development of our platform,” he said.

Sheather said this means that for any customer, cloud computing will become more cost-effective and can be expanded in smaller increments than those offered by major Australian competitors.

“Expanding into the private cloud creates a completely new offering for us, while reducing costs for our public cloud customers as we don’t need to pay the big vendors’ really high storage costs. We would be the first Australian cloud provider to own their entire stack from end to end, and doing it in a completely unique way,” Sheather said.

And because all its storage is onshore in Australia, CloudCentral has the potential to be the software-defined storage provider of choice for companies constrained by regulation from storing data offshore.

Sheather expects this new product will allow his Australian cloud computing organisation to undercut larger competitors, and attract customers at enterprise and government level on a global scale.

“It’s a massive opportunity. We will be able to sell an integrated cloud system at up to half the price of the legacy incumbent competitors. We can either embed our software into the cloud based storage we sell, or the software can be purchased by customers to install on their own hardware,” he said.

Richard Elling who was CTO of DEY Storage Systems is currently a member of the CloudCentral advisory board and will remain an advisor to the company under the terms of his existing advisory agreement. Garrett D’Amore, co-founder and VP of engineering at DEY, will be providing consulting and advisory services to CloudCentral on an ongoing basis.

When the newly renamed CloudCentral Limited (formerly Dromana Estate) is floated the company expects to raise a minimum of $3.5 million from their IPO.

Founded in 2010 by Kristoffer Sheather, CloudCentral is a cloud computing business providing wholesale IaaS and Platform-as-a-Service services directly to IT solution providers and SaaS developers. The cloud services platform is based upon low-cost commodity hardware and purpose built cloud software enabling rapid deployment of new services at low-cost, delivering benefits to IT vendors and their customers. It delivers a business critical cloud platform with cloud ready management.

CloudCentral is a 100% Australian owned and operated with an existing point-of-presence in four Tier-III Australian data centres within the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and Victoria. As an Australian owned and hosted service provider, it provides data sovereignty assurances by storing customer data within Australia’s borders.

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