NICTA spinoff and cloud technologies provider Yuruware has been sold for at least $10 million to South Carolina, US-based Unitrends

Yuruware sells technology to Unitrends for +10m

Mark Campbell, Unitrends chief strategy and technology officer, said it was “blown away” by what Yuruware had on offer.

While on holiday , Campbell was told that he had to “immediately talk to this exciting new company”. One phone call to Yuruware founder Anna Liu and the rest was history.

Campbell and Unitrends’ chief architect were in Sydney doing due diligence within weeks - and four days later - drew up a term sheet 

“We were blown away not just by the software but by the team,” said Campbell

Another advantage was the proximity of more than 100,000 engineering students to research body NICTA’s Sydney offices, Mr Campbell said.

Yuruware provides cloud technologies for migration, monitoring and business continuity for Amazon Web Services and other public cloud systems, and the  technology will be incorporated into the uni trends brand .

 

NICTA chief executive Hugh Durrant-Whyte -hopes to double the 10-person workforce by the end of the year with Ms Liu at the helm of Unitrends Australia.

Ms Liu will be hiring front-end user experience specialists to complement back-end distributed systems technology experts.

She hopes to ramp up its marketing efforts as Yuruware’s products are delivered online for a global audience.

The acquisition will form the basis for an Asia-Pacific push for Unitrends which operates in the US and Europe.

“We do very little sales here (but) in 12 months’ time we’re planning to move into Asia-Pacific,” Mr Campbell said.

Unitrends is part of Insight Venture Partners which has around $US8 billion under its belt.

Mr Campbell wasn’t specific about the size of Unitrends’ war chest but said the most common question from his board members was “what would you do with US$100m?”.

“Our ability to identify and acquire is our limiting factor, not the amount of funds,” he said.

Mr Campbell wasn’t specific on the types of companies on his list but other areas that would complement Unitrends’ technology stack were “almost infinite”.

Organisations that offer software-defined networking, big data and endpoint security solutions would immediately catch his eye.

NICTA broadband and the digital economy director Terry Percival said the deal was a validation of its researchers and commercialisation model for creating spinout companies.

Ivan Kaye from BSI says, it actually validates the value prop of large corporates and superfunds to back the likes of NICTA, incubators and startups - and these companies should take over the 

federal and state government has previously provided

Telstra and NICTA this week announced a five year arrangement that will see researchers from both sides work on security, privacy, smart network planning and future media delivery as part of a multi-million dollar scheme.

Government  will still provide funding for value adding to these companies and retrospective rebates and concessions such as the r and d tax incentive and export market development grants.

If you would like access to these grants - contact Marcus Webb of BSI Innovations