Stax to expand in New Zealand, Southeast Asia

Australian cloud management platform Stax will expand into New Zealand and Southeast Asia by the first quarter of 2022, following triple-digit growth rates and new funding from private investors.

Over the past year, the company, which began as a product division at Versent, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner, grew its year-on-year revenue by 175% and doubled its headcount to more than 60 employees.

Buoyed by the pandemic, which has spurred cloud adoption across Asia-Pacific, Stax has also raised A$23.6m in private funding and invested A$37m in research and development throughout its 2021 financial year. To support this next phase of growth, it has hired three new executives to drive sales, operations and marketing, and has appointed Thor Essman as managing director.

Stax said its platform “takes care of the fundamental foundations required to operate on AWS” while minimising cloud complexity and reducing the time-to-market for cloud deployments from months to weeks. In the past year, it has secured customers such as Event Hospitality & Entertainment, Daymark and Carsales.

Essman said: “Our philosophy is to constantly challenge the IT industry to bring greater discipline, automation, craftsmanship and delivery excellence to enterprise technology. The Stax platform is a dynamic symbol of this, helping our customers drive cloud outcomes with more impact, lower risk and lower cost.”

While Stax acts as an “off-the-shelf” solution to help businesses operate in the cloud quickly, it also supports industry-specific regulatory requirements and can be customised to match an organisation’s individual preferences.

The company has offices in Sydney and Melbourne and is currently hiring for a range of engineering and channel-focused roles. Its platform is available on AWS Marketplace and via selected partners.

Australia’s public cloud market is dotted with global and domestic players, with maturing adoption across public and private sectors.

Amazon still rules the roost in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), as is the case for many cloud markets in the world. According to IDC, AWS continues to lead the pack with a 32.3% market share, followed by Microsoft (23.6%) and Google (12.7%).