PageUp People builds in Azure

Human resource software-as-a-service vendor PageUp People has built its first application in Microsoft Azure with a view to one day moving completely into the public cloud.

The Melbourne company spends some $50,000 a month on infrastructure, with hardware in Britain, the US and a Datacom facility in Melbourne.

It employs a total of 125 staff, including 30 software developers and five infrastructure and networking professionals.

PageUp People chief information officer Simon Cariss said the company preferred to host software in the cloud to lower costs and allow staff to focus on its core business – software development.

But he said its use of the public cloud was constrained by customer requirements and privacy legislation, explaining that PageUp People processed about 150,000 job applications weekly on behalf of 150 “very large multinational corporations”.

“Our business strategy is to move all software onto best-in-class cloud platforms, because its in alignment with our business goals and the business strategies of many companies that we work with,” Cariss told iTnews.

“It’s really a journey; the customers we have on board have very tight requirements about information security and the services that we manage.

“Data privacy is a very sensitive issue and we need to be mindful of that as we transition onto cloud services.”

To date, PageUp People has limited its use of the public cloud to its CareerPath application, which generates career development and training information based on 30 million anonymous employment records.

Cariss said CareerPath was built specifically for Azure – a decision that saved it an estimated $30,000 a year on hardware and $100,000 on time it would otherwise have spent managing infrastructure.

He acknowledged that the application could not easily be shifted off Microsoft’s platform, but said building in Azure had allowed PageUp People to avoid tinkering with lower levels of the application platform stack.

Azure is hosted by Microsoft in Singapore. Competitors Amazon and Rackspace have recently opened data centres in Australia in a bid to attract local customers.

Cariss said PageUp People was still evaluating cloud providers for the rest of its applications and data, noting that it may not require its cloud host to have an Australian data centre.

“We have customers in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Europe – just about every country all over the world,” he said.

“Everything needs to be evaluated in [a global] context … many of our US competitors aren’t hosted in Australia.”