Cloud provider, ASE Networks rising to the top of the Australian it industry

It’s undeniable that the future of IT is ‘Cloud’.  IT procurement is expected to be entirely cloud related within five years and is predicted to be a USD$100bn industry in the US by 2014.  As the public becomes more educated on cloud, and as businesses discover new found cost and operational synergies, Australia is demanding to have world class infrastructure.

A company that had an early mover advantage on this is ASE Networks, now one of Australia’s leading cloud service providers.  Founder of ASE Networks, Andrew Sjoquist, is bullish on the company’s growth prospects, “We were fortunate enough to spot the move to cloud early.  By 2006, we had our first government client with the Australian Defence Force.  If anyone understands military procurement, it demonstrates our systems were flexible, robust, and most importantly, secure.”

ASE’s “EaaSy” (Everything as a Service) desktop-to-data centre approach gives the company the ability to provide the full IT product suite such as telephony/VOIP, connectivity, data storage, backup, disaster recovery and much more.  It also maximizes the company’s revenue potential by targeting large IT budgets.  “One of main selling points is that major capex budgets are now converted to opex.  This fundamentally changes the nature of IT expenditure from now on,” continued Mr Sjoquist.

“Our view, supported by industry activity globally, is that cloud services in the future will be a utility in the same way water and electricity is viewed.  This is becoming more the case with not just business services migrating to the cloud, but companies such as Apple, Netflix and Skype providing music, film and telephony as cloud services. To support these activities there is a global spending drive to provide first-rate worldwide coverage and connectivity, and ASE Networks is capitalising on this opportunity.”

ASE Networks is in a period of rapid growth meeting new revenue benchmarks and growing its portfolio of infrastructure assets.  ASE has just signed an agreement with Next DC, to provide the company’s 8th data centre and its first in Melbourne.  This adds to ASE Networks’ five data centres in Sydney, one in San Jose and one in New Jersey.  This grows the footprint towards the network goal of global coverage with data centres planned for Brisbane, Singapore, Hong Kong and London.

These business activities are supported by some ambitious corporate initiatives.  “We plan to be at the forefront of the cloud space in Australia through acquisition, partnering and joint ventures to rapidly grow our network.  What is important to our current investors, and the people we have met through Wholesale Investor, is that we create a financially robust group with improving growth metrics.”

With cloud computing among the most active M&A sectors worldwide with global players consolidating rapidly to gain a foothold and improve market share, ASE Networks is positioned as an exciting high growth, low risk global business poised to deliver impressive investment returns for many years ahead.