OrionVM eyes growth with Anthony Woodward hire

The wholesale IaaS arm wanted a leader who knew the industry well.

Wholesale infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company OrionVM has hired former Logicalis Australia CEO Anthony Woodward as its chairman as a part of its growth strategy.

In selecting his chairman, Sheng Yeo, CEO at Orion VM said he wanted to work with someone who knew the industry inside out.

“We're basically trying to bolster the team and get a few more people that are experienced on the books to be able to bring that all together,” he explained.

“We wanted to work with somebody that knew the industry well, but also somebody that had the same realm of views of ethics of how we would deliver to a client, the quality all of that. That was a good mix in Anthony that we found as well.”

Woodward was recently the CEO of managed services provider, Logicalis Australia. He brings expertise in corporate governance and shareholder engagement from five years serving as a non-executive director for APRA-regulated neobank in1Bank Limited.

He has been a key member, organiser and chair of the Pearcey Foundation’s NSW chapter

since 2010.

For the next 12 months, Woodward said his role at OrionVM is about strategy and creating governance.

“My view as a board member, it's really engaging the founders in setting out a strategic plan and then putting in governance up around how we do that. A bit more of a formal kind of border arrangement, working with shareholders,” he said.

“In terms of what exactly does that strategy look like on the ground, growth is the key.”

The wholesale IaaS company will be keeping an eye on particular trends around MSPs to ensure it stays on a growth trajectory. Someone of these trends include public cloud and AI.

“There is a big amount of repatriation of cloud of public cloud back into private for security for different requirements,” Yeo said.

“We're working with MSPs on how to go to market with those solutions. How to build a secure solution that customers are happy with.”

Yeo noted a big part of that is enabling them to deliver more AI.

“But what that really means for enterprise, a lot of it is process automation. What we do with Blaize a lot of it is AI video surveillance, so being able to do threat detection through AI,” he said.

Over the next year, OrionVM will be taking those productised AI solutions and giving it to MSPs.

“Over the last 10 years we've learnt that industries don't want to home grow every solution, they would rather have a partner give them an outcome driven product,” Yeo said.

“We've been working a lot with partners to develop the bundled solutions like Blaize with their AI chip and go to market together with those solutions.

“A lot of broadening the MSPs we are working with and continuing to improve on the size of partners we work with, the types of products we bring to market.”

OrionVM was founded in 2010, it has developed a hyperconverged tech suite to deliver delivery cloud solutions to its customers.