US-based cloud infrastructure vendor ramps up Aussie investment

David McJannet - CEO, HashiCorp

US-based cloud infrastructure automation provider, HashiCorp will be investing heavily in the Australian market following its Series C investor funding in October, which raised US$40 million.

Founded in 2012, HashiCorp addresses the technical challenges of cloud adoption through a range of open source tools such as Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad.

From an alliance perspective, the vendor works closely with major cloud providers to simplify the cloud adoption process, holding partnerships with Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.

HashiCorp CEO David McJannet has already visited partners and customers in Australia, noting that local end-users were among some of the company's first clients.

Furthermore, and prior to establishing a local presence, HashiCorp user groups across Australia have been springing up, almost reaching 1000 members.

"We have a growing customer base here and we’re looking to invest fairly aggressively," McJannet said.

"Australia is an important market to us and we’re at that stage where we’re now investing in our field organisation, our technical support services locally to help some of the larger companies that rely on us to run their cloud infrastructure.

"Some of our earliest commercial customers for HashiCorp were Australian customers and we’ve been supporting them out of the US. They’ve been seeing the value in our products for a long time."

To help support local growth ambitions, the company hired Ned Shawa as solution engineering leader across Asia Pacific (APAC) about three months ago.

Prior to joining HashiCorp, Shawa was regional solutions engineering leader for Hortonworks, alongside previously holding technical roles at EMC, NTT Communications ICT Solutions and NetApp.

Going forward, the company will also be hiring a solution architect to help with the implementation process, alongside recruiting a sales representative further down the line.

McJannet revealed that in the past 12 months, HashiCorp experienced 22 million downloads of its open source products.

“We have quadrupled the size of the company in the past 12 months, and we will double again in the next 12 months,” McJannet said.

“As everyone is adopting cloud, our products are foundational elements, and customers have been waiting for a commercial face to engage with.”

According to McJannet, two of his primary focuses were on partner relationships and customer support and success.

Two months ago, HashiCorp took the wrappers off an extended partner program for system integrators and resellers.

The system integrator component involves technical training, expert resources, sales and marketing resources, with Contino and Vibrato already part of the program.

The reseller component of the program allows resellers to drive license sales and provides access to resources and rewards.

“In relation to Australia, we’ll be building out our technical organisation and also focus on our broad ecosystem of partners,” he added. “We’ve got a small number of resellers, but we still heavily focused on system integrators.”