Cloud Reset – The Podcast | Episode 5: Cloud Repatriation and the Bold Move Paying Off for Collaboro
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Episode Summary:
In this episode of Cloud Reset, Jono and Naran are joined by Warwick Boulter, co-founder and CEO of Collaboro, an Australian SaaS company leading the way in digital asset management. Warwick shares his journey from TV production to building a rapidly scaling tech company focused on enabling brands to reclaim control of their content, ensuring it’s ready for the future of marketing.
Why you should tune in:
- How Collaboro is navigating rapid growth and acquisition in a sluggish market.
- The importance of data sovereignty for Australian businesses and how it influences customer decisions.
- Collaboro’s bold move to embrace cloud repatriation to optimise costs, increase data control, and enable AI use cases.
- The rise of hybrid and containerised environments to improve scalability and portability for SaaS platforms.
- Insights on preparing IT strategies to handle acquisitions and the unknowns of new data types.
- Practical advice for business leaders on spotting red flags in partnerships and attracting top talent through innovative approaches like Employee Share Options Plans (ESOPs).
This episode is packed with real-world examples and actionable insights for Australian SaaS businesses, IT leaders, and anyone navigating the evolving digital and cloud landscape.
Episode Transcript:
We are back. This is episode five. I don’t know when we stopped counting episodes, Jono. It doesn’t feel like now. Never. Never. We’re going to keep counting them indefinitely. We have another special guest in the hot seat. You know this person very well, you know them better than me. I know them quite well.
Who are we talking to today?
Well, today I’m pretty excited to have with us Warwick Boulter, co founder and CEO of Collaboro, a wonderful Australian digital asset management business that’s doing some really interesting stuff, especially baking in a little bit of AI. And, uh, and doing some cool things for some of the biggest brands that everybody, uh, would know and love in Australia, a little bit of bio on Warwick before we welcome you Warwick to the hot seat, um, after a long and successful career as a TV producer for international brands, Warwick felt the pain and noticed the marketplace gap on both the client and agency side, when it came to storing, finding and sharing the digital assets that they had produced as CEO of Collaboro Warwick aligns.
The team behind one mission and that is to enable brands to reclaim control of their content and position it to be ready for the future of marketing. Fantastic Australian business doing some innovative stuff. Welcome to the hot seat, Warwick. Oh, thanks Jono. G’day Naran. Hello. Thanks for having me on you guys.
Pleasure. Yeah, great. And look, one of the things, um, that’s really interesting to me about Collaboro is that you’re an Australian SaaS business and you are in absolute growth. And acquisition mode scaling up rapidly. And, uh, I know there’s a lot of investment out there as well. Keen to keen to hear your views on that.
Um, and it is, uh, you know, a juxtaposition because I think everybody would agree we are in a bit of slow. sluggish market, um, but obviously not for Collaboro. And, uh, one of the things that I’d love to get into with you today is just some insights for you around the rise of the importance of sovereignty.
When it comes to Australian brands and their data and their assets and their IP. Um, so let’s get into that.
Well, um, I might just sort of start by saying that, yeah, like growth and acquisition is almost the one topic at the moment for a business like ours. I think underlyingly the marketing vertical is quite depressed. You know, as the economy tightens, marketing tightens even harder. Um, and we therefore are looking pretty heavily in acquisition mode, which is great fun.
You know, you get to understand a whole bunch of other businesses and in working pretty, um, deeply with our cloud providers, we can immediately go to those acquisition targets and look at them in a holistic fashion and go, well, where can we save money by bringing those cloud synergies together? Um, and to me, that’s kind of interesting stuff.
You know, I quite like it. I think. Um, I’m a bit of a closet nerd. I’m not a nerd by trade, um, but I, I think my
trade, I think we should, was he casting dispersions there? I’m not sure what he, I’ll take it. I’m not sure I care for his time.
I think, um, probably you guys were certainly my CEO, um, CTO, Jeff. See me as a frustrated engineer, so I have just enough of the right words to make them sound okay, but I really don’t know what they mean underneath.
Well, that
is Jono and I. We’re all in
the same boat. Um, we’re fortunate though to have a pretty supportive venture capital behind us and, uh, and they like the strategy of rolling together a bunch of businesses. It’s interesting you talk about the sovereign topic. Because critical to our acquisition path is hoovering up a bunch of companies that are sovereign to Australia and who have a real interest in data sovereignty as part of their offering into market.
Is it fair to say your customer base cares about that as well, just as much as you? Totally. Yeah.
You know, every new sales deal we see through the door, sovereignty is a topic.
Yeah. You know, we see that play out, um, obviously in government trying to push independence and sovereign. In terms of sourcing and where you keep your data, uh, we’re also starting to see that extend into conversations as it relates to AI, you know, and a lot of people playing with new models and, and, you know, the early adopters starting to say, well, where’s your data going?
How’s that playing out for you? Um, So I think that’s um, I think that’s something that is going to become increasingly important and obviously you’re seeing that, you know, I think you’ve even like, it’s the make or break in terms of whether or not you win some business or not as to where are my digital assets actually going to reside.
Yeah, I think there’s actually, um, two topics there, uh, around AI and sovereignty. So topic one is, yeah, sovereignty is critical to, to any kind of data play these days, certainly in Australia. You know, the Australian government’s really hardcore on things like personally identifying information, making sure it stays in the country, um, and making sure it’s managed.
But when it comes to AI, Um, what we are doing with our customer data is moving it into effectively a private cloud to reduce the, um, egress costs and I might start a fight here. I’m not sure, uh, reduce the egress costs, um, to allow our customers to then utilize the assets that they have an iron. Um, and allow them to be used in any kind of AI that they like.
Um, so making sure just to kind of dig into those two topics. One, they can use their assets at scale really easily without penalty. Um, and two, they know that they’re local and they can remain local as part of those use cases.
Yep. Look, it’s forgivable for you to use the word egress. That’s fine. I mean, I am the head of the Azure business, so it is a real thing for sure.
And look, um, our customers are increasingly becoming hybrid customers as well. So egress is a very valid conversation to have. Certainly. So yes, that resonates. I think
especially when you’re in the business of moving data around.
Yeah,
right. Like that, that’s actually what you’re in the is you’re in the business of housing these important assets and enabling organizations to move it around and use it on location and access it from different places.
And so that involves some level of portability of those assets, right?
Definitely. I think portability and accessibility is really critical to it.
Yeah,
totally.
Yeah. All right. Great conversation. Uh, we’ll be back to straight after this break.
Okie dokie. We are back. We’re here to get stuck into the customer scenario.
So here we go. And this is on cloud repatriation. Sweet merciful. Right. So let’s, let’s frame this, shall we? So I am the head of the Azure business. We’re talking about cloud repatriation. Um, look, it’s a real thing. It’s a real topic. Um, I know that we work very, very hard within our Azure managed customer base to make sure that we are ever working to reduce cost.
Um, we know that hybrid is a, not just a popular conversation, but a real directive. Now we know that our customer base want to make sure they’re getting value for money for their workloads. Um, but I would say from a global perspective, repatriation is a very, very real thing. I’m going to say something super contentious here.
Here we go. Right? So this came directly from an AWS employee. Allegedly, cause it allows me to say anything after that. Okay. Allegedly 40 percent of AWS’s customers are considering in part or in full to repatriate. How’s that for a stat?
Look, I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised. It could actually be more.
They might just be the ones that admit it. You know, this is, um, probably been a topic that’s been gaining real traction over the last 12 months. We think, uh, downward pressure on, on budgets, um, is probably the primary driver. But increasingly, The ability to scale without, and we’ve spoken about this before, the ability to scale without giving a large percentage of your revenue back to your hosting provider is something that every business is now interested in, especially if they’ve gone all in on one particular cloud, and that’s where we’re seeing the real rise of the adoption of hybrid, you know, and even looking at some of the latest stats out of the US, um, 81 percent of CIOs are considering Repatriation.
And I know that was, um, that was probably one of the initial topics that got us. Speaking to Warwick.
So that’s the ultimate setup Warwick. And we know that Collaboro made a bold move to repatriate data from the public cloud to private. Talk us
through it. It’s a couple of topics in there. Um, topic number one, our customers, we talked about sovereignty at the start.
Our customers are really focused on sovereignty and security. Um, they’re big enterprises, they’re very public and they don’t want their public stuff living anywhere that they don’t know where it lives. So it’s pretty critical to them that, um, sovereignty and security is central to it. However, with the rise of AI and potentially generative AI, training algorithms are out there somewhere.
Our customers need to be able to release those, uh, those assets they have with us into the wild to be able to train, to train the algorithms. Um, so there’s another topic there around, um, egress. But I think really for us, cloud repatriation has been Um, to learn much larger elements element. One is cost, which you touched on Jono.
Um, you know, if we look at AWS is on demand pricing of two and a half cents ish a gigabyte a month in private cloud, Macquarie, we charging 0. 9 gigabyte a month. So, you know, it works out really well for us. And at the end of the day, SaaS is largely a margin game. So you’ve got to play your margins. Um, the second topic for us is actually slightly off topic.
And that’s that moving into a private environment allows us to decouple from platform as a service and start looking at containerized operation. What’s interesting is most of our customers are talking to us about. their repatriation. So they want to keep their data in their world. So we therefore need to have an application that we can place in their world, whether that world is Azure, whether it’s AWS, whether it’s private cloud, doesn’t really matter.
Um, and our drive to have a containerized platform is a really important thing to solve that customer use case. Doing that in a private cloud. That means that we kind of can’t go backwards. We have to go forwards to do it.
Hmm. That’s fantastic. Speaking. There’s a real life example. I think we were talking, I can’t remember.
It was cause we named the episode with numbers, episode one or two cover, which one it was, that idea of cloud portability, workload portability. And I think Naran and I were toying with this idea of, you know, asking people, talk to your teams, how portable is your app? Can you traverse platforms that will, uh, you know, and respond to market forces because your customer wants to be there and you need to do that to close the deal or because this platform, there’s been a price increase and that’s going to impact your margins, you know, and I’d say, um, you’re probably an early adopter of this strategy really thinking about or being and also being really forced to think about how portable is my app? And you’re, you’re looking at that containerization strategy.
I think Warwick’s got the best of all worlds there. I mean, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve heard a cost driver and this is a cost and risk podcast, right? So we’ve heard a cost driver there and some material cost savings that allow you to, um, deliver the commercial, um, drivers you need as a SaaS provider, tick number one.
Um, you’ve got the sovereign piece covered off, right? Which is important for your business, for your customers equally, but you’ve got a hybrid clay. Uh, hybrid, sorry, play there with containerization as well, because you recognize that your customers want to retain aspects of portability. So I think you’ve, you’ve really nailed all three points there.
We mentioned risk a little bit. Um, there’s also the risk that the hyperscale providers, if you’re using, uh, PaaS, don’t continue to have that product for you or change the pricing and you’re wedded to it.
You’ve like hard coded to that, to that platform.
Exactly. So, you know, we, we were really reliant on, uh, Azure Media Services.
got deprecated at the end of June. So most of our competitors and others around us have pivoted to AWS. Um, we, however, have gone, well, hang on, we need to take greater control of our future. Yep. So we’ve built our own
foresight there. You know, I’m really interested in that stat. Maybe we’ll just get Warwick to say it again.
Uh, you know, a little plug for the private cloud, how much cheaper will we pay? This is not what this
podcast is
about, Jono. Oh, let’s go. He can’t help himself. 2 1/2 times but I
think appearing on the podcast, it could be 3 or 4 Jono. Oh, look, I feel like
it’s more than that. But look, that’s a really. So, you know, really, um, such maturity, uh, I think, and, and thought leadership there for any Australian homegrown scale up SaaS business, thinking about, you know, how do you be successful in terms of your technology strategy?
I’m hearing portability, you know, to, to mitigate your risk. And I’ve really loved you talking about that, about taking control of your own destiny or your own future. You know, so powerful. We’ll be right back after the break.
All right. We’re back with our subscriber question. This week’s question comes from a subscriber, uh, incidentally in the SaaS space. So, uh, obviously deliberately picked it for Warwick. Um, we’re growing fast, looking at acquisition opportunities. How do we prepare our IT strategy to handle new data types and the unknown?
That’s a great question. I think it might talk to the first thing I said or a recent thing I said around taking control of your own destiny a little bit. So, um, how do we prepare our IT strategy to handle new, uh, inputs? It’s actually going to be a lot about people based. Make sure you’ve got the right people skills in the business to accept the different data types coming in.
And it’s often, if you’re acquiring a business, it’s not even often about the data itself. It’s about way the way. I didn’t say that well, so you can have this, um, it’s about the way that the data is handled by that application and what that application contains within it to be able to then use that data properly.
And there’s a huge cost in that transition space between it’s theirs and it’s ours. And that cost is largely the time for people to turn it from theirs, the acquiring parties, the acquired parties, into ours, the acquired
parties.
Right.
Yeah, that’s really interesting. So there’s cycles to be spun in terms of, you know, hours of effort.
That’s a real cost hours of effort of smart people to ingest those environments. Into your environment. Is there efficiencies there to be gained is like in terms of, you know, looking for the right type of asset that you would acquire. Can I, can I bring this thing into my machine and can one plus one equal three in terms of the bottom line.
That’s obviously the game, right?
Yeah, totally. I think that’s the game. I think, um, uh, there’s two parts to that, certainly from my perspective. For the acquisitions we’re looking at, uh, part number one is about, um, acquiring that customer data and that customer revenue flow and making that easy for the customer.
Uh, part two is also around, um, functionality and capability. You know, the acquired platform might be an adjacency that has functionality that you don’t have, but your customers are after. Um, or the acquired, uh, platform might be a direct competitor who is out competing them in certain places. So making sure that you bring on their customers and their data and therefore their revenue really easily and seamlessly.
But then above all, making sure that the future of that group business is around functionality and how the gains can be made in your existing and future markets.
I like it. Yeah. So a lot of that due diligence up front and you need clever people to be inspecting those those assets and putting a good strategy together, right?
Yeah. I think
the clever people is the key.
Yeah. Okay. All right. Great. Practical advice. Um, we’ll be back after this break and now he’s going to take us through some 3 more questions. Alrighty.
We’re back. So here we go. This was, um, Once upon a time, a new segment. I think this is the second time we’ve done this.
We asked the same three questions for each guest that we have the privilege of dumping in the hot seat and assaulting the way we have to you today. So here we go. Here’s the three questions. Question number one. If you had to cut 20 percent from your budget tomorrow, where would you start?
Uh, in this business, it’s definitely about looking at unused, unused storage of our customers.
So, you know, there’s lots of assets that they never touch. Um, if we can go to those customers and say, Hey, let’s look at, um, reducing the amount of storage you use, no doubt that will reduce the amount of revenue that they generate for us. But our marginal revenue is pretty significant. So, uh, the cost savings.
Far stronger. Got it. Um, in my old life as a TV commercial producer, I think the answer would have been, don’t go to lunch all the time.
Are you saying we should tighten our belts on, on the corporate Amex or is that how it works? No, not,
not, no. I’m a Macquarie customer.
All right. Very good. Here we go. Thank you.
Question number two. What’s your one piece of advice for attracting the smartest talent in your team?
ESOP. ESOP. What’s that? Uh, an Employee Share Options Plan. Ooh. So give them a piece of the pie and um, make them, not make them, but inspire them to want to be a part of the journey.
I see. I like that. We should, we should
be
doing that too, Jono.
That’s a
very SaaSs answer.
I love it. All right. Good. Question number three. Here we go. When you’re evaluating a prospective partner, how do you spot the red flags that tell you they’re not the real deal? When you’re
That’s a really good question. Um, and I’m not very good at this. I’m a very positive, believing person.
Um, so I don’t, I, I, I would actually, for me personally say, have good people around me that can help spot red flags. Okay. Rather than, uh, I see, I see shiny lights and shimmer and think that’s fantastic and I should go down that path.
Well look, Warwick, I mean clearly you are a beloved customer of our business.
How did you find Macquarie?
Oh, good question. Uh, through a venture capital partner, uh, or an advisor I have, uh, introduced into the Macquarie business. And I think it’s one of the coolest things ever.
Huh? Yeah. Another referral. Another referral. I like that.
We need to find out who that venture cap partner was.
Buy them lunch on your Amex. All right. Uh, listen, that’s a wrap. Warwick, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you.
Thanks so much Warwick, great to see you. And that’s a wrap for today. Thank you so much to Warwick for being on the show. Hopefully you can come on again. It’s been wonderful having you.
And look, um, if you’ve got a question, uh, something you’d like answered, um, reach out to us, um, please, uh, via any channel, uh, we’ll obviously put all the details out like we always do. We love questions. Um, so ask us anything if you’re mortally wounded or offended by anything that’s been said, let us know.
Feedback, all feedback is good. So thank you.
All right. Thanks for listening in everyone. If you’ve enjoyed the show, then don’t forget to subscribe to cloud reset on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or YouTube. And of course, follow us on LinkedIn. So you never miss an episode until next time, stay tuned. We drop a new episode every two weeks and we have more special guests to come.
That was cloud reset straight talk, real solutions.
