Security provider Webroot this week launched its first data centre in the southern hemisphere to support its expansion into the Asia Pacific market.

Located in the Southern Sydney suburb of Mascot, the data centre represents a $1 million investment in the vendor’s Software as a Service (SaaS) business model in the region.

Anticipating a robust, educated market in Australia, Webroot COO Mike Irwin said that the Sydney data centre was an important milestone in the company’s expansion in the Asia Pacific region.

“As we start to expand into the Asia-Pacific market, and specifically look to address the needs in Australia, building the data centre here and being in a position where we can make a visible commitment to customers and to the marketplace was a pretty important component of the overall growth strategy of the business,” he told iTnews.

“Webroot is committed to servicing the Asia Pacific in the long term,” he said.

Webroot’s range of SaaS offerings, including e-mail management and Web content security, will be hosted on the data centre and provisioned via the Web.

Irwin described the SaaS provision model as “security outsourcing”, and expects it to provide customers with security expertise that will give them access to up-to-date, enterprise-level infrastructure.

While the technology market is estimated to grow up to 10 percent per annum, the annual growth of SaaS uptake has been estimated at 60 to 70 percent.

According to Webroot’s Asia Pacific managing director, Charles Heunemann, the SaaS model will appeal to resource-tight IT departments in Australia.

“Your typical IT shop [in Australia] will be trying to get more juice for their squeeze, so they’ll tend to hang on to some of their on-premise infrastructure for perhaps longer than they need to, and the refresh cycles on technology aren’t as rapid as in other jurisdictions,” Heunemann said.

“With the introduction of our new SaaS, a lot of the customers out there can completely leapfrog the whole appliance play and go straight to the cloud and take care of the problem there.”

The $1 million data centre forms part of a $10 million investment Webroot has planned for the Australian market during the next two years.

All products and services will be delivered via Webroot’s channel partner base, which currently comprises nine partners, including Clearswift and WebSecure.