Australian e-commerce company shrugs off US behemoths with cloud move

Australia’s eCorner has signed a deal with Macquarie Cloud Services to help it use public cloud services to fend off growing competition from larger US providers.

The Sydney-based e-commerce technology and hosting provider was founded in 2003 as the master distributor for ePages, a European e-commerce platform. Realising the e-commerce market in Australia was reasonably immature in those early days, eCorner evolved to become a one-stop-shop for local SMEs that needed guidance on selling online.

With its previous co-location datacentre, eCorner couldn’t scale its offering in the same way as its cloud-dependent competitors and meet the fluctuating demands of its customers. At any given time, data and resource usage could change dramatically, making it difficult to accurately predict what resources were needed to meet merchant and consumer demand.

eCorner made the decision to take a page out of its US rivals’ books and invest in public cloud services, making the company scalable and helping it to stay competitive at a time when Australians are spending more than A$21bn annually online.

The company has found success among Australia’s SME community, providing secure hosting services to fintech start-ups such as Lodex.co, Australia’s first auction-style loans and deposits marketplace, in addition to a range of tailored e-commerce offerings across a variety of industries.

The new cloud environment eCorner and Macquarie provide helps Lodex.co and others manage and simplify areas such as PCI DSS compliance to allow them to handle transactions and compete against big banks and other lenders.

“Large-scale e-commerce owes a lot of its success to the cloud,” said Jae Debrincat, general manager of eCorner. “We needed to adapt a similar model to be flexible and survive in an increasingly-competitive industry.”

“With Macquarie, we know where our technical support and data are, a guarantee larger cloud providers couldn’t give – that’s vital, particularly with GDPR and mandatory breach disclosure. Our customers’ primary data is in Sydney CBD, and it backs up to a datacentre up the road in Macquarie Park. Local hosting also makes our services faster because there’s no reliance on international pipes.”

Macquarie Telecom Group CEO, David Tudehope, sees this as an example of the often-elusive generational start-up ecosystem working together in Australia.

“If you look at Macquarie, eCorner and Lodex.co – it’s three generations of former and current start-ups in Australia working together and challenging large competitors,” said Tudehope.

“Smaller businesses often believe the cloud is made for large enterprises and not something they can use to their advantage. It’s quite the opposite; there might just be a different, local approach to cloud that matches their business goals. eCorner has found that mix and can use the cloud to help start-ups and SMEs tap into the fast-growing eCommerce market in Australia.”