Home 30under30 2012 Sheng Yeo, 2012 Anthill 30under30 Winner

Sheng Yeo, 2012 Anthill 30under30 Winner

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What is 30under30?

30under30 is an Anthill initiative launched in early 2008 to encourage and promote entrepreneurship among young Australians. Each year, we invite our readers to nominate young Australian entrepreneurs deserving of recognition for their outstanding entrepreneurial endeavours. More.

Sheng Yeo, NSW (b. 1988)

Name: Sheng Yeo
Age: 23 (Born: October 1988)
Gender: Male
State: NSW
Known for: OrionVM

Sheng Yeo refuses to take ‘impossible’ for an answer.

A co-founder and operations manager of OrionVM, the developer the CloudDC platform, Yeo relishes the opportunity to beat the deep pockets in the industry at their own game. This year marks his third consecutive spot on Anthill’s 30under30 list.

And he isn’t halfway through his twenties yet.

His immense influence on global IT is easy to overlook. He may never build a fancy phone or an addictive app. What he has built is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform that has a big impact on how companies store and share their most vital information. A platform whose performance doesn’t just compete favourably with Amazon’s — it leaves the online behemoth in the dust.

Lest we forget, OrionVM originated when Yeo and his partners were a couple of mostly broke students at the University of Technology of Sydney. Virtually no one was talking about the cloud then, much less designing a distributed, decentralised storage model of the sort that would set Orion’s service apart.

Today they have well over 100 clients, yet it took a lot of patience and creative funding strategies to get off the ground.

“It is never an easy step to convince someone to trust your brand new platform to host their mission-critical business applications,” admits Yeo, “especially when your team is just over 20 years old. Convincing our customers that we would be there to assist them if they had any issues, and that we were the best solution for their problem, allowed us to sell to our first few clients.”

This year, OrionVM was hired by the NSW Government to provide cloud services to the Department of Trade and Investment for its Collaborative Solutions Program, which is geared toward stimulating the ICT industry.

“We have grown our business from nothing to a seven-figure yearly run rate revenue,” says Yeo. “With enough work, anything is possible.”

CloudDC has been independently cited by CloudHarmony.com as one of the fastest-running hosts, if not the fastest, in the world. Yeo and his team have taken that distinction and run with it — and they’re promising an even faster platform build on the way.

Anthill asks: Sheng Yeo, have you ever been lucky, punk?

We were invited to dinner with a gentleman that ended up being our key advisor and supporter. After hearing what we had to say, he was intrigued by the company and what we stood for. It is funny where you meet people, and we were just lucky that we were invited by one of our friends to attend a dinner when were were set on going home for rest.

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To check out the full list of Anthill’s 30under30 winners, click here.