"Our off-premise private cloud provides infrastructure billing and orchestration, all run from Santa Clara. They load the software to the platform and remotely manage it. Customers then get the benefit of a fully leveraged operation."

The Santa Clara operation, previously known as Opsource, was bought last year. It was originally funded by Dimension Data parent NTT and Intel and run as a private and public cloud.

"They really understand cloud control software," Hartendorp says.

Questioned about his claim to have the first private cloud in New Zealand, he says his definition is an environment that can be multi-tenanted.

"I think the DIA approach is wrong because transition was always going to be a problem. They should have gone for a large private cloud. At the moment, external providers are very vanilla, with no applications."