WHEN Graeme Speak first encountered the term 'cloud computing' it was something of an epiphany.
WHEN Graeme Speak first encountered the term ‘cloud computing’ it was something of an epiphany.
Since the mid-1990s Mr Speak, bankrolled by his traditional Perth-based technology business Central Data, had been tinkering away with a concept of a virtual computing system for which the user needed nothing more than a screen and an internet connection. He called the business GoPC.
During that period, the Perth-based technology entrepreneur had agonised about whether he was wasting time and money developing something that would never be understood by the market.
Then, in early 2008, the participants at a conference Mr Speak attended in the US started delving into this subject, commandeering the term ‘cloud computing’ for the notion of stationing systems, software and applications elsewhere.
“We had been doing it for 15 years,” he said regarding GoPC, which has been operational for the past five years.
“We are so far ahead of the market it is not funny.”
At the time, Mr Speak had already committed to the commercialisation of GoPC, having raised $1 million in late 2007 to fund his move to San Francisco to get close to the networks of Silicon Valley.
He now believes the time has come for GoPC to be taken to the market, seeking between $2 million and $8 million from private investors and venture capital.
Mr Speak believes the key markets will be home offices, SMEs and big users such as education providers who want to take advantage of his system to a full suite of open source-based office applications and a virtual server, housed on a super computer and accessible at high speed for what he says is a fraction of the cost of buying typical hardware and software.
As an example, he said a company with 350 users that recently signed onto his system would pay $2,500 a month, compared to a cost of more than $500,000 expected in the first 12 months.
