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Bevan Slattery's Cloudscene launches international telco marketplace

Cloudscene Marketplace will extend Bevan Slattery's telecommunications services directory to link buyers and sellers of cloud, datacentre, voice, internet, and IaaS services.
Written by Corinne Reichert, Contributor

Australian technology entrepreneur Bevan Slattery has launched an online international marketplace for the buying and selling of cloud, collocation datacentres, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), internet, and voice services.

The marketplace is being launched by Slattery's Cloudscene directory, which was itself launched a year ago and now claims to be the world's biggest directory for cloud service providers, collocation datacentres, and network fabrics.

"With Marketplace, Cloudscene is now able to bring buyers and sellers together, to close the gap and facilitate a smoother buying experience. Coupled with the network intelligence offered by the data on our connectivity directory, we're able to provide a much greater support to enterprise buyers," Slattery said.

According to Cloudscene, the international marketplace was established in response to market demands, with access to more than 5,000 providers.

Slattery said Cloudscene began two years ago, when he decided to publicly launch a spreadsheet that he had personally used to keep track of datacentre and cloud services providers worldwide -- with users of Cloudscene then requesting to be connected with these service providers.

"Prior to Cloudscene, it wasn't possible to get the level of detail I required to support the needs of the other telecommunications-based businesses I'd established. I figured if it's a problem for me, it must be a problem for others," Slattery explained.

"Shortly after we launched Cloudscene, the market quickly realised the potential of the data our analysts were collating. With more than 6,000 datacentres and 5,000 service providers, our users began asking us to help match them to service providers who could fulfil their needs for services such as transit, metro Ethernet tails, or international capacity.

"Initially, we just helped by connecting people, but after a while we decided to build a solution that benefits the entire industry, and Cloudscene's Marketplace was born."

On first launching Cloudscene in August 2016, Slattery said it was aimed at improving industry transparency and consolidating the fragmented cloud services market, adding that it was born "out of frustration".

"It's been evident for some time that the traditionally long and difficult buying process for datacentre and enterprise cloud services was not going to change," he said at the time.

"Having invested significantly on these services myself, it became obvious that there was an information gap that needed to be filled."

Slattery was also behind the foundation of interconnection services provider Megaport; Asia-Pacific fibre infrastructure company Superloop, which was created when Megaport's fibre assets were spun off; and submarine cable construction company SubPartners, which was acquired by Superloop earlier this year.

Alongside Google, Singtel, Telstra, AARNet, Indosat Ooredoo, and Alcatel Submarine Networks, Superloop and SubPartners will be building the 9,000km 18Tbps Indigo subsea cable system connecting Sydney, Perth, Singapore, and Jakarta by mid-2019.

Superloop also recently completed construction of its 1,728 fibre core Hong Kong subsea cable TKO Express, which connects Chai Wan on Hong Kong Island and Tseung Kwan O (TKO) Industrial Estate -- Hong Kong's new major hub for technology, datacentre, financial, and media companies, as well as submarine cable landing stations -- on the mainland.

The acquisition of SubPartners followed Superloop last year buying out BigAir, whose wireless network will be combined with its fibre assets to provide a high-speed wholesale alternative to the National Broadband Network (NBN) across outer metro and regional areas and accelerate Superloop's fibre rollout across Australia.

Superloop reported a net loss of AU$2 million for the first half of the 2017 financial year, improving on the AU$3.5 million loss recorded for FY16, on revenue of AU$8.8 million, up 351 percent year on year.

Megaport, meanwhile, reported a net loss of AU$13.77 million for the first half of FY17 due to its series of acquisitions and global expansion, as revenue more than quadrupled to AU$4.5 million.

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