STI buys stake in cloud-computing firm

Businessman Eusebio Tanco has invested in Los Angeles-based cloud computing firm Morphlabs Inc. through his STI Colleges, creating synergies in pooling manpower for the IT firm’s operations in the Philippines, Japan and Australia.

“I think cloud is not only the future, it’s already here,” STI president Monico Jacob told reporters, confirming the buy-in deal into Morphlabs, which is powered by Filipino engineers and IT specialists.

Martin Lichauco, managing partner of Global Gateway Venture Capital (G2VC), which is the majority investor of Morphlabs, separately said that STI acquired “a minority stake.”

Morphlabs was established in 2007 to make elastic cloud computing possible for network administrators and software developers. Cloud computing, the new IT buzz word, is a service to customers wishing to outsource the maintenance of servers and applications, scale up or down their systems as needed and mine data via the Internet anytime anywhere.

Asked what value STI could bring to Morphlabs, Lichauco said: “STI will provide the strategic manpower to deliver cloud computing in the Asean [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] region.”

Morphlabs’ mCloud series of cloud-enabling products targeted data centers, service providers and the enterprise market in Japan, North America and Asia.

Meanwhile, Jacob said STI was now building a new campus in Novaliches, Quezon City, a five-story, 5,000-square-meter facility worth P300 million. The building would be finished in time for the next school year opening in June, he added.

Jacob said the new facility could accommodate about 5,000 students. This would be where students would be transferred from the campus in Lagro where STI only rents space at present.

“What we’re doing is transferring campuses, not creating new ones,” Jacob said, noting that STI had about 90 campuses at present, hosting a total student populace of 67,000. “Our philosophy is to bring the campus to where the students are.”

Jacob said STI as an education institution was very agile. As the Tanco group also had an overseas placement company, it could quickly adapt to trends in manpower demand. When the group saw the demand for nurses abroad was dropping, he noted that STI consolidated its nursing colleges.