IaaS provider nabs AAPT as first wholesale customer
Business-centric telco AAPT has become the first official wholesale customer of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider OrionVM.
"We have invested heavily in our own network infrastructure, and we partner with the best-of-breed system integrators and suppliers to ensure we have the highest-grade solutions available," AAPT CEO David Yuile said in a statement.
He had previously said that he wanted to foster a cloud business within AAPT worth more than AU$50 million in the next few years.
AAPT will be delivering its OrionVM-powered hosted cloud services through connect.com.au, a company it acquired in 1997. The telco soft launched the service a few months ago and has been trailing it out since then, according to OrionVM managing director Sheng Yeo.
"It's a great partnership because AAPT delivers a great tier-one carrier network that allows us to get the data from our cloud to their customers very quickly," he told ZDNet.
Connect.com.au will complement AAPT's existing cloud portfolio. The company is also selling content delivery network (CDN) services. The offerings on connect.com.au are geared more towards SMBs.
Yeo said OrionVM is in talks with other tier-two telcos to strike up similar deals.
"Telcos is one avenue we are focusing on, but the other one we are getting a lot of traction in is system integrators and independent software vendors (ISVs)," Yeo said.
OrionVM launched in 2010 and currently has hundreds of resellers under its wing. It specialises in selling white-label cloud services mainly to system integrators and value-added resellers (VARs), Yeo said.
While the company does have a few resellers that do engage in wholesaling OrionVM cloud platform, AAPT is the first large scale customer that can be named as an official wholesaler.
"Some of our wholesalers don't want to be named as using a secondary platform — obviously the whole point of having white-label is being able to say it's their own," Yeo said. "But AAPT doesn't mind us mentioning it."
Yeo made it clear that OrionVM is not looking to compete with the likes of Google and Amazon directly in terms of selling cloud services, but rather, it wants to give its customers the chance to do so. The company has invested a lot of money to make it easier for customers to make OrionVM's cloud platform their own, Yeo said.