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US firm Unitrends nabs NICTA co Yuruware for at least $10m http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ ... rgakx-1226936241340 NICTA spinoff and cloud technologies provider Yuruware has been sold for at least $10 million to South Carolina, US-based Unitrends. Mark Campbell, Unitrends chief strategy and technology officer, said the company was “blown away” by what Yuruware had on offer. Mr Campbell recalled his initial encounter with Yuruware -- a phone call atop a (dormant) volcano in Hawaii while other tourists looked on. It was his first vacation in seven years but one of his colleagues had big news for the executive. The excitement was over a small Sydney company, Yuruware, which Mr Campbell’s team believed was ripe for acquisition. He was told that he had to “immediately talk to this exciting new company”. One phone call to Yuruware founder Anna Liu and the rest was history. Within weeks, Mr Campbell and Unitrends’ chief architect were in Sydney doing due diligence over four days. “We were blown away not just by the software but by the team,” he said. Another advantage was the proximity of more than 100,000 engineering students to research body NICTA’s Sydney offices, Mr Campbell said. Yuruware provides cloud technologies for migration, monitoring and business continuity for Amazon Web Services and other public cloud systems. Financial details for the transaction were not disclosed but the buyout was foreshadowed in mid-May by NICTA chief executive Hugh Durrant-Whyte. Mr Durrant-Whyte told The Australian that a NICTA company would be sold to a foreign entity for an “eight figure sum”. Mr Campbell said that the Yuruware brand will cease to exist but its products would be incorporated into Unitrends’ offerings. There would be no layoffs; in fact, he hopes to double the 10-person workforce by the end of the year with Ms Liu at the helm of Unitrends Australia. Ms Liu will be hiring front-end user experience specialists to complement back-end distributed systems technology experts. She hopes to ramp up its marketing efforts as Yuruware’s products are delivered online for a global audience. The acquisition will form the basis for an Asia-Pacific push for Unitrends which operates in the US and Europe. “We do very little sales here (but) in 12 months’ time we’re planning to move into Asia-Pacific,” Mr Campbell said. Unitrends is part of Insight Venture Partners which has around $US8 billion under its belt. Mr Campbell wasn’t specific about the size of Unitrends’ war chest but said the most common question from his board members was “what would you do with US$100m?”. “Our ability to identify and acquire is our limiting factor, not the amount of funds,” he said. Mr Campbell wasn’t specific on the types of companies on his list but other areas that would complement Unitrends’ technology stack were “almost infinite”. Organisations that offer software-defined networking, big data and endpoint security solutions would immediately catch his eye. NICTA broadband and the digital economy director Terry Percival said the deal was a validation of its researchers and commercialisation model for creating spinout companies. Dr Percival said Australia needs to “keep pumping out top of the range IT graduates”. “We’ve got the raw material but we need base funding from government,” he said. NICTA is funded by the federal and state governments but the Abbott regime will cease support after 2016, leaving the research outfit to find alternative means like its tie-up with Telstra. Mr Durrant-Whyte’s main concern was the impact on the 300 PhD students it currently supports. The telco and NICTA this week announced a five year arrangement that will see researchers from both sides work on security, privacy, smart network planning and future media delivery as part of a multi-million dollar scheme. https://www.nicta.com.au/ |
