15 September 2011
Miami-based Venturian Hosting, which provides custom computing solutions and private cloud networks to companies, has partnered with São Paulo-based Triad Systems who will act as its marketing and sales arm in Brazil and beyond.
“Triad is going to be the feet on the ground,” said Venturian Founder and CEO Allen Firouz. “They’re going to be offering solutions, reselling some of the cloud offering and providing some service on top of that locally.”
“We do not focus on sales, we focus on solutions,” Firouz added. “What we do is partner with a company such as Triad. They have the relationships, they understand the needs of the geography and what they can do is facilitate the conversation.”
Venturian started in 2003 offering customized software for companies but moved into the cloud computing space in 2008, and partnering with groups like Triad has been at the heart of its strategy. It currently has about 30 employees in its Eighth Street offices just off of Brickell Avenue. The company has data centers inside the NAP of the Americas in downtown Miami and in Virginia.
It doesn’t target any specific companies based on their size of annual revenues. Firouz wouldn’t say what the company’s revenues are or how it’s fared during the economic downtown, only that “we are completely self-funded… and have been profitable since we went into production in 2008.”
To date it has clients in the Caribbean, Europe and Africa and deals with companies with annual revenues ranging from $1 million to $2 million up to $66 million.
Cloud computing could be a powerful boost for economies and companies in Latin America, which continue to grow due to limited exposure to the U.S. debt instruments that continue to wreak havoc across Europe.
“The great thing about cloud computing is that is that it is a democratizing force,” Firouz said. “It allows organizations and countries to bypass the linear path of technology growth to catch up and let them leap to the front.”
Telecommunications giant Verizon Inc. entered the cloud computing space in Latin America earlier this year when it bought Miami-based Terremark, owner of the NAP of the Americas, for $1.4 billion. The company earlier this month acquired a 200,000 square foot data center in São Paulo.
“Developing countries are seeing a huge benefit,” in cloud computing, Firouz added. It “allows them to very quickly become competitive, and to have the same resources, technologies, applications, redundancies and continuities that have been outside [their] reach.”