Aussie Cloud Firm OrionVM Enters U.S. Market With White-Label Partner Offering

A new cloud player from Down Under is aiming to shake up the market with its wholesale business model and white-label program for VARs.

OrionVM, based in Sydney, Australia, was founded four years ago and went live with its cloud service a year later. Now the company is offering a white-label program to U.S. solution providers, which OrionVM said is highly desirable because of the potential for enormous profit margins and the ability to rebrand a vendor’s cloud service as their own.

OrionVM co-founder and CEO Sheng Yeo conceded that many in the industry view the wholesale cloud business with suspicion. That includes Cisco System, which in announcing the expansion of its cloud business last month with a $1 billion play said the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model is a ’loser’s game’ because it can’t be priced competitively.

[Related: White-Label Cloud Services: Why It's Taking Off And When You Should Be Careful ]

But according to Yeo, that’s only if you don’t have the right technology for the job.

Yeo and his developers in Sydney, Australia, modeled their cloud on breakthroughs in supercomputer architecture. Their custom technology, built from the ground up, yields an IaaS environment that is extremely reliable, flexible, and efficient, he said.

Daniel Pfeiffer, OrionVM’s vice president of marketing and partnerships, told CRN the efficiency is derived from the unique architecture that offers ’redundancy and performance better than anything out there.’

This is the stuff of cloud 2.0, he told CRN. And that means the white-label program offers partners unique cost benefits.

’A public cloud can be cost prohibitive as you scale,’ Pfeiffer said. ’But we can grow very efficiently.’

Yeo said current models in the burgeoning market require cloud providers to either build their own cloud directly, or partner with a vendor to deliver value-added services on top of the vendor’s platform, adding he believes ’there’s a space between the two ends of that spectrum.’

That space involves ’allowing people to have their own cloud without having to build it form the ground up.’

By offering a white-label program, channel partners can take credit for a great cloud solution for their customers, rebranding the platform as their own and generating huge revenues in the process.

If the partner offered customers a price point comparable to AWS’ recently reduced rates, they would generate margins between 30 and 70 percent, depending on the size of the deployment, according to Pfeiffer.

OrionVM has set up shop in San Francisco and partnered with StrataCore, a cloud broker in Seattle. Josh Gay, StrataCore’s senior strategic account manager, said the Australian company’s next-gen technology will help the IT broker ’deliver winning IaaS solutions for some of our top clients.’

’OrionVM has figured out how to build high performing, extremely reliable cloud infrastructure, all at significantly lower price points than the offerings of bigger name vendors,’ Gay told CRN.

The plan is now to grow and expand into more U.S. states. ’Our strategy is to reach out and work with partners all over. We are a pure channel cloud so we don’t sell directly to end users,’ Yeo said.

Orion is targeting several market segements: managed service providers, telcos, and enterprise PaaS and SaaS companies. Those are the types of companies that could use a turnkey solution that allows a partner to enter the market immediately and customize almost every service for their end users.

OrionVM is flexible in how it approaches partnering. Yeo said they can support ’any type of deployment’ and customers can find their own pricing and templates.

’We fit our solution to their business model rather than the other way around,’ Yeo said. ’We believe in enabling the business, not constraining it."

And the company wants to work with its partners, offering sales and technical training, billing assistance and help integrating with their platform, as well as joint public relations.

’We do get our hands dirty with a lot of that. Our customers’ success is our success in the long run,’ Yeo said.