Not afraid of thinking big (and acting even bigger), three Aussie university students have created a cloud storage startup service to take on Amazon.
You can never accuse Sheng Yeo, Alex Sharp and Joseph Glanville of not thinking big. Really big. In 2009 the trio was separately dabbling with a number of software development and system administration projects on top of their studies at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Sharp and Glanville planned to develop a search engine that produced more relevant results than Google by allowing users to rank results. The first challenge was that developing a system that ‘learned’ from user responses required a huge amount of computing and database processing power.
The second, even bigger challenge was that it would put them in direct competition with Google. Meanwhile, Yeo worked on his own radio engineering project, which also needed a large amount of computing power.
Left to right: Alex Sharp, Joseph Glanville and Sheng Yeo.
The paths of the three students intersected when they soon realised they all needed cheap, readily-available high-performance computing and storage power to drive their ambitious projects. But when they attempted to build their projects using Amazon’s cloud product, EC2, they found it didn’t suit their needs. A quick Google search showed a lack of readily available, reliable high-performance computing, which meant there was actually a huge market for these services.
They decided to attack this fledgling market, and OrionVM was born. As the summer of December 2009 rolled around the boys worked tirelessly over the holidays to develop a prototype. They even quit their jobs and went into debt to buy the required servers, processors and hardware. The hard work has resulted in a beta version launched in April 2011. Yeo, now the OrionVM CEO, says third-party testing shows OrionVM beats competitors in key areas of benchmarking for high-performance processing and storage.
He says what makes the custom-built OrionVM platform special is that it uses a distributed storage system which uses high-speed connections (40Gb/s) to spread the load between servers. This means as the load increases there is more redundancy built-in to ensure speed is unaffected. By comparison, competitors use a centralised storage array, which creates a bottle-neck as the load increases, because more servers are required to boost resources.
The product is getting traction in the market and at the time of writing OrionVM was weeks away from breaking even.
However, the boys haven't done it alone and regularly turn to the start-up community for help and advice. This includes consulting with Alan Perkins, chief information officer at electronics manufacturing software developer Altium.
Perkins was first introduced to the trio by Sydney start-up scene mover-and-shaker Bart Jellema, who heard the boys were looking for some help around the branding and product positioning.
The first meeting between Mr Perkins and OrionVM was intense. Perkins says: “I asked them some pointed questions, trick questions. I wanted to see how much they were focused on the technology versus the sense of how they can change the world. Their response was very much on what I thought would be the right things, rather than not just the geeky aspect.”
The boys are convinced they can build a world-leading technology. Yeo says: “We’re out to prove the doubters wrong. If we wanted to make a whole heap of money, there’s a lot easier platforms we could've built say in the social scene like a group buying platform.
“It's more for ourselves, being able to say we started something ourselves when everyone said we couldn’t. We took that through from nothing to a point where it's a successful. That's the biggest driver.”