Mr Arnaud Blandin: We want to invest in areas where private cloud adoption is strongest, and we see a great deal of opportunity and interest in the entire APAC region.

While cloud computing offers tremendous benefits of cost economies and scale efficiencies, the concern for organisations has always been whether its privacy and security needs will be compromised as a result. Recognising the opportunity to close this gap, Intalio has developed a unique paradigm which allows large enterprises and service providers to experience the best of both worlds.

“We differentiate from other cloud providers by focusing exclusively on private cloud computing,” said Mr Arnaud Blandin, APAC Managing Director and Vice President of Alliances, Intalio. “We are selling to large enterprises and service providers that want the key benefits of cloud computing - scalability, multi-tenancy, and metered services - but need to have all of the technology inside their firewall.”

Under the banner of Intalio|Cloud, the company brings its own equipment and cloud technologies into its customer’s premises and sets up the necessary components to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).

The IaaS layer provides elastic compute and storage utilities, while the PaaS layer provides a set of application engines and development tools used to create and manage complex enterprise applications, and the SaaS layer provides a set of pre-built applications such as business process management and customer relationship management, that can be used as is, or as templates for developing custom applications.

“Nearly every vendor in the cloud computing space is selling a solution that plugs into a public cloud configuration, but only Intalio provides a complete stack from the hardware through the platform to the applications,” said
Mr Blandin.

While Intalio wanted to start small in Asia in 2008, the growth of its business soon led to the opening of a full subsidiary early last year, with rapid expansion expected to take place this year.

“We opened a representative office in 2008 with the intention of testing the market for our unique business model,” noted Blandin. “[However], success came quickly and first major customers were signed that same year, [and] we decided to open a full subsidiary of the company in February 2009 with a focus not only on sales and marketing but on support and professional services.”

The Singapore office looks after the Asia Pacific region and provides trainers, consultants as well as support to customers in the region. While it currently has a staff strength of four, that is expected to change in the next few weeks as Intalio looks to employ engineers that will develop part of the core products. “We expect to have a staff of 15 people by the end of the year,” said Mr Blandin.

Apart from the ability to find talent for its business, Intalio sees Singapore as an excellent location both from an infrastructural perspective as well as support from the government.

“The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) has provided a R&D grant that helped Intalio to accelerate the opening of an engineering centre in Singapore,” said Mr Blandin.

“We want to invest in areas where private cloud adoption is strongest, and we see a great deal of opportunity and interest in the entire APAC region,” he added. “Singapore’s good location and an excellent airport facilitating travel in the region, makes it easy to do business.”