OVH vice-chairman Laurent Allard says the business is growing rapidly in the Asia-Pacific region.
In a boost to the Victorian tech sector, French cloud infrastructure unicorn OVH is setting up an Asia-Pacific region headquarters in Melbourne to take on the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and it intends to employ up to 80 locals within three years.
The infrastructure-as-a-service company, which has more than 20 data centres in Europe, Canada and the US, has also built centres in Sydney and Singapore, as part of the company's expansion to the region.
OVH vice-chairman Laurent Allard told The Australian Financial Review while in Australia for the launch of the Asia-Pacific hub that the company's expansion into the region and the US was part of a bigger vision to become the global leader in cloud infrastructure-as-a-service.
"I'm not from this type of company background where the focus is on small and medium-sized businesses. I'm used to dealing with large enterprises and big transformation projects," he said.
"It was clear to me that the OVH model worked well but it was important to become the global leader, whereas at the time [in 2015] it was the European leader. We started out with no account manager for large accounts and had a very tech-driven company with gaps in terms of how to drive the company's strategy, but I had that expertise to bring and I'm very pleased with our complementary skill sets."
Until February 2015, Mr Allard had been the group chief technology officer of global IT and business process services provider CGI and until 2008 he was chief information officer of AXA Tech.
OVH, which already has 5000 customers in the Asia-Pacific region that are predominantly Australian businesses, was founded in 1999 by Octave Klaba with only $4000 and has remained a family-owned business in Roubaix, France.
Mr Klaba and his family still own 80 per cent of the business, which was valued at more than 1 billion in 2016.
The milestone valuation came after a 250 million capital raising led by New York-based private equity firms KKR & Co and TowerBrook Capital Partners.
OVH provides businesses with either public or hosted private cloud infrastructure, as well as bare metal cloud servers, But it considers its point of difference to be its ability to provide businesses with a hosted private cloud that works like a public one, and can be scaled up within 10 minutes to provide additional capacity during expected or unexpected busy periods.
The company said it selected Melbourne to be its Asia-Pacific region hub because of its talent pool and liveability, and OVH APAC expansion adviser Emmanuel Goutallier said the state government had actively engaged with the company ahead of the move.
"The state government has been extremely supportive. We started to engage with them mid last year and they have helped us understand the benefits of being in Melbourne and they've exposed us to something important the education community here in Melbourne, since we want to hire locally," he said.
"We have a strong in-house education program, but it needs to be complemented by external programs."
As well as establishing a presence in Australia, OVH will bring with it its Digital Launch Pad program. This is expected to be up and running by the end of June 2017 and will provide a range of free resources to start-ups on application, including up to $100,000 of cloud infrastructure support.
It is also in discussions with LaunchVic on how to support the local start-up ecosystem.
OVH joins a growing list of international tech companies which have set up offices in Melbourne, including Hired, Square, Slack and Zendesk.
Part of its decision to set up shop in Australia was to provide a local service to its customers here, fitting with the company's decision to create a wholly owned subsidiary for its US operations earlier this year, allowing it to operate in a way best suited to the US market.
"Our business is global, but we have to have a global-local approach. Technology can be a great generic asset, but the business solutions require proximity," Mr Allard said.
"We believe cloud is the way to build business solutions, but at the end of the day you need people on the ground and you need that proximity."
OVH is also in discussions with major telecommunications providers and cloud application businesses about establishing local partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region.
In the 2016 fiscal year OVH reported revenue of 320 million and by 2020 the company wants to hit 1 billion in revenue. By the end of 2017, the company also expects to have grown to 27 data centres, which will likely include more centres in the Asia-Pacific region.
The company has also pledged to invest 1.5 billion in its services over the next five years.
See the article here:
European tech unicorn OVH opens APAC HQ in Melbourne - The Australian Financial Review
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