Pinoy cloud startup gets $5M to grow in ASEAN

Filipino IT startup firm Morphlabs Inc. announced Thursday that it has recently closed a $5 million (PhP212 million) financing deal with its investors, allowing the cloud services provider to expand its offerings in the ASEAN region. In a press briefing, US-based Morphlabs CEO Winston Damarillo said the new round of Series C funding was led by partners BBT of Japan and an Indonesia-based private investor group. These were on top of other Filipino investors. Damarillo said they will be using the recently acquired capital to fuel deployments of IT solutions in the ASEAN region as well as some implementations in North America. At the same time, Morphlabs on Thursday launched its mCloud Data Center Unit (DCU) solution, a dynamic infrastructure offering for the enterprise which it will primarily market in the Southeast Asia. mCloud, Damarillo explained, is basically a hosted private cloud platform, which means Morphlabs will be owning the hardware used by customers a pay-per-use basis. Unlike public clouds which are solutions accessible to everyone, Morphlabs marketing director George Telenko said customers will "get dedicated hardware when they run their systems in the mCloud platform." Telenko said this means servers hosted through the mCloud service are not shared by any other firms, giving customers the peace of mind that their sensitive data will not leak out. In the Philippines, Damarillo disclosed that telecom firm Globe Telecom is their strategic partner in providing the service, which is hosted in Globe's MK2 data center in Makati. He said the advantage of having the service hosted in the Philippines is that the data wouldn't have to go outside the country anymore before being delivered to local firms. "In the Philippines, we have no more than 60-gigabit bandwidth. If it is hosted outside, we are going to easily saturate that bandwidth," he pointed out. Other than the fact that Morphlabs is a company conceived in the Philippines, Damarillo said they decided to target firms in Southeast Asia because unlike the rest of the world, countries in the region do not have to overcome significant legacy system issues. "The fact is, we're growing faster than the US and Europe. Here, there are no barriers to adoption, no legacy baggage to carry. We believe we will prosper in the ASEAN region faster than anywhere in the world," he said. The company has already partnered with other firms in the region, Damarillo said, which include Indonesia's IT products and services provider Pratesis. The Morphlabs CEO also disclosed that the company has chosen the Philippines as an integration center for region services. "It used to be that Singapore is the preferred integration center in the region. But our development team is here. They will make sure that our software is tested for scalability, among others." Morphlabs, established in 2007, is the cloud computing arm of Global Gateway Innovation Exchange (G2iX). Exist Global, a technology services firm founded by Damarillo in 2001, is one of the implementation partners of the mCloud DCU solutions in the Philippines. — TJD/VS, GMA News