NZ cloud services provider seeks capital

NZ cloud services provider seeks capital for global expansion
Auckland 18 May 2015 -- Auckland-based cloud services provider Virsae is looking to raise $3 million from equity investors to accelerate international growth.
Developed and launched in 2013 by unified communications specialist Agile, Virsae provides cloud-based applications that manage unified communications and call centre environments.
To date fully funded by Virsae shareholders and company management, new capital will drive Virsae’s product development and bolster sales teams and partners in the USA and UK.
Currently 85 per cent of Virsae’s seven-figure revenue is from international markets. The company has more than 30 staff, including a team of New Zealand-based developers, and its flagship product Virsae Service Management (VSM) processes more than two billion transactions a month.
In preparation for the company’s first external equity raising, Virsae has appointed professional director and ex-investment banker Mark Cross – who has taken a stake in the company – to Virsae’s board of directors.
The developments follow a string of recent successes for the Albany-based company. Earlier this year Virsae signed up global distributor Westcon Group to distribute VSM to resellers in Europe, the Middle East, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.
Virsae has also cemented re-sales agreements with large international technology providers, including Arrow SI – a subsidiary of NYSE-listed US tech giant Arrow Electronics – Altura – based in California and one of the largest communications solutions and services organisations in North America, and UK-based Azzurri Communications.
Local customers include government agencies, large manufacturers and retailers, and insurance provider IAG. However, Virsae’s sights are firmly set on the global Unified Communications Services Management market, worth an estimated US$2 billion according to Virsae.
Virsae’s indirect sales model rides on the shoulders of partners, principally large systems integrators, who resell VSM as part of their managed services to corporates. Virsae’s largest US partner Arrow SI, alone, manages communications for an estimated 10 million end-users.
Virsae is Agile’s second successful software company spinoff. In 2009 Agile sold software division Agile Software to unified communications giant Avaya.
Virsae CEO Tony Jayne said that while Virsae lacked the profile of cloud businesses, like Xero, its aspirations were just as bold.
“We’re on a mission to grow a global business at the forefront of cloud-based unified communications service management. This new multi-billion dollar category is largely untapped as businesses recognise the need for specialist toolsets to maintain reliable enterprise communications,” said Jayne.
“This is a very exciting stage of our development. Now that voice is firmly entrenched in the IT network, IT managers require specialist tools to understand and manage their communications platforms. However, traditional IT service management tools don’t go deep enough, and Virsae is one of a few service management vendors dedicated to managing voice and unified communications,” he said.
Jayne said Virsae’s cloud-based software-as-a-service model was geared for unlimited scale and emerging categories
“At the centre of VSM is a data and analytics platform that captures unstructured data and presents it as contextually relevant information that drives customer decisions. It is very much the engine room for big data and the internet of things,” he said.
Jayne said Virsae was built from the ground up for cloud delivery, a rarity among unified communications monitoring companies.
He said Microsoft Azure delivered the capacity to cope with skyrocketing transaction volumes and supported a low-touch, one-to-many service model.
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