Published on the 24/10/2013 | Written by Newsdesk

Recent commentary that infrastructure-as-a-service reaches an economic barrier around the $50,000-a-month mark has been dismissed by Freelancer.com…

Australian skills-crowdsourcing start-up Freelancer.com has dismissed recent suggestions that when an organisation is spending $50,000-a-month or more on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) the economic arguments about cloud computing start to break down, meaning that companies would be better off buying and managing their own systems.

According to founder and CEO Matt Barrie, “we spend way over $50,000-a-month on web services,” noting that computing services were among the company’s biggest investments. He said that the benefit of IaaS was sustained even for large organisations adding that, “until recently we only had one guy running our whole infrastructure.”

Daniel Oertli, formerly the chief information officer of online real estate business REA, and founder of the start-up Roomz, which provides an online service to match potential lodgers with home-owners, said he had first used IaaS to allow REA to develop faster and close the gap between writing code and deploying it which was needed for the business to remain competitive.

“A CIO would be stupid to think about investing in plumbing,” he said. Those that had should “get out of it quickly,” he added.

An IDC survey released earlier this year suggested there may already be plans afoot to offload more of the plumbing to the cloud – even where it is currently managed by a third party. According to that report more than 40 percent of Australian organisations planned to move a part of their outsourcing or managed services activity to cloud services over the next 12-24 months.

Barrie and Oertli were speaking at an Amazon Web Services roundtable event in Sydney alongside fellow start-up founders, all of whom maintained (naturally as they were hand-picked by Amazon to attend the event) that being able to access cloud computing services had been instrumental to their success as they had not needed large capital injections to get their businesses off the ground.

AWS managing director Ed Lenta said that there was plenty of evidence that local start-ups were particularly challenged to find capital, and that Amazon Web Services was “instrumental in the way start-ups think about the world”.

He said that Amazon ran facilities out of nine separate regions, eight of which were available to start-ups (the ninth region is reserved for US Government use) allowing them to locate services close to their international customers.

Matt Barrie, who is listing his business on the ASX in November, said that Australia’s economy was “primitive” at present given the continued focus by both government and investors on resources. Instead, “we need companies to generate great productivity and wealth multipliers,” he said. However Barrie noted that investor appetite for tech stocks such as the recently listed OzForex and accounting software specialist Xero signaled an interest in the sector.