The investment came from healthcare entrepreneurs Cathie Reid and Stuart Giles, founders of Australia’s largest cancer services provider Icon Group and Epic Pharmacies, known for their development of digital health tools. Cathie Reid has also been appointed as a Director on ADG’s Board.
“We are delighted to have Cathie’s exceptional talent and experience join our Board not only to support our strategic growth planning but also to help nurture the talent development of the young women and men within our Group,” said Phil Dawson, Founding CEO of ADG.
“This current investment from Australian investors and partners will allow ADG to establish a similar community cloud platform for Australian Government that supports equivalent characteristics and unique needs of a sovereign nation rather than the one size fits all Made-in-America model,” he added.
According to Dawson, the investment is a significant step forward for both ADG and digital industries exporting UK innovation to nations valuing national security and information assurance.
On her recent appointment as a Director of ADG, Cathie noted:
“On meeting the ADG founders and team, we recognized the opportunity to invest in like-minded people who are driven to make change with a purpose of greater value for citizens and secure operation of government and healthcare. ADG has an incredible opportunity to effect change and we look forward to contributing to the growth journey.”
Australia to be ADG’s primary focus now
Following the global financial crisis, the UK Government has initiated digital and procurement policies and processes to effect transformation, which has reportedly facilitated the growth of companies like UKcloud that were developed to support the UK’s sovereign needs.
“The Australian Government were one of the first to take note of the UK’s successful transformation and openly copy policy and design with development of the Digital Transformation Office, which Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull duly credited to Francis Maude and the GDS team. There is no UKcloud equivalent in Australia, specifically designed to support Australia’s growing requirement to collaborate securely at multiple classification levels,” said Scott Wilkie, CEO of ADG, APAC.
“We intend to take the best of British learnings and apply some world leading Australian IP to create an assured cloud IaaS platform built for 2020 and beyond – highly secure and built for large data sets which require highly performant compute supporting analysis from multiple trusted collaborating parties. Although senior officials from other friendly nations are calling to express interest, we are completely focused on Australia at this stage,” Wilkie added.
ADG has established a separate entity for the Australian cloud platform and expects to make further announcements in the near future.
