Umbraco opens Melbourne office to service APAC partners

After years of partners asking for a regional office, the open source CMS company has answered their pleas.

After years of pleading to be in the APAC market from their partners, open source CMS company Umbraco has officially opened an office in Melbourne.

The company has listened to its partner’s pleas, and hired Emmanuel Tissera, former technical director at Luminary to head up the APAC region. They officially opened at the beginning of January.

The majority of their partners are digital agencies that build enterprise level websites, plus, they work with some smaller agencies too. Their partner program has three tiers: platinum, gold and silver.

Speaking to CRN Australia about the move, Tissera said the main goal for Umbraco and its APAC partners for 2026 is to make sure their partners are winning.

“Whatever they are putting into Umbraco, they're getting it back. Making sure that there is a win for them with everything they put into Umbraco,” he said.

“Whether it is the partnership, it's their developers who are contributing to the project, or it is going and pitch in it for enterprise clients.”

For Umbraco this year, they want to double the number of partners they have, they came into the market with 12 partners, they’ve added two since launching earlier this month.

"We are slowly edging our way towards doubling that up in this year, and then making sure, while we double that up, that there is enough work in the enterprise space for those clients,” Tissera added.

With a software background, Tissera explained that he is bringing to his partners a “solutions-based” approach for what their partners are looking for.

“Helping them out with the technical side of things as well as a strategic side of things, so that we can help them grow,” he said.

“What we see in the market is, even with our competitors, licensing fees are very high, and project implementation costs are very high.”

As Umbraco is open source, Tissera noted that developers can download the software and use it for free without paying a sent to Umbraco.

“How we make our money is through cloud hosting and native add ons of the product,” he said.

“With that, we want to make sure that we bring that revenue in for us, but also make sure that our partners get the best implementation deals they can, and the developers enjoy it.”

The first plan of attack for Umbraco and its partners is establishing the ANZ market and then they will look to the greater APAC countries.

“[The next country] might be Singapore. But again, we will see what happens during this year, because what we are seeing is more people approaching us, because they will see we are in a time zone that we can be contactable,” Tissera added.

In his message to partners, Tissera highlighted that while the company is known as “the friendly CMS” it reflects not only in their tagline but in their ways of working.

"I just want to take that forward, I want to make sure that we take that DNA, Umbraco’s friendly DNA, across to partners, clients and the community,” he ended.