Umbraco opens Melbourne office & appoints APAC head

Danish content management firm Umbraco has opened a new office in central Melbourne and appointed long-time collaborator Emmanuel Tissera as Head of APAC, as it expands its presence across Australia, New Zealand and the wider Asia-Pacific region.

The Melbourne base will act as a regional hub for technical support and sales. The company plans to build a local team that will work with digital agency partners and larger customers that use the Umbraco open-source .NET content management system.

Regional expansion

The move extends a programme of international growth by the Denmark-headquartered company. It follows the launch of a US office in Charlotte, regional hosting for Umbraco Cloud users in the UK, Australia and Canada, and a UK office in Bristol.

Umbraco has offered Australian regional cloud hosting since 2023. The company later added Canadian regional hosting and UK regional hosting. It says these regional options address data residency and latency requirements for customers that run digital services in specific jurisdictions.

The Melbourne office gives Umbraco its first physical base in Australia. The company already works with several agencies and customers in the region that build websites and digital services on its CMS.

New regional head

Tissera will lead the APAC operation from Melbourne. His remit covers Australia, New Zealand and other Asia-Pacific markets.

He joins Umbraco from Australian digital agency Luminary, where he was Technical Director. Luminary was the first digital agency in Australia to reach Umbraco Platinum Partner status, alongside two other local agencies that have since achieved the same level.

During more than a decade at Luminary, Tissera led and expanded a team of developers working on digital projects for larger organisations. He also played a role in the establishment of Umbraco's regional hosting in Australia and New Zealand in 2023, which addressed data residency needs for Umbraco Cloud users in those markets.

Tissera has worked as a software engineer for 23 years, including 21 years focused on content management systems. His experience spans both client-side and agency roles.

He has worked in-house for organisations including Emirates in Dubai and Australian Associated Press. At Luminary, he worked as Senior Developer and later Technical Director. He led website projects for Australian consumer and infrastructure brands, including Snooze, Metricon and Melbourne Airport.

He has also led discovery work for New South Wales Government, UNICEF and The Salvation Army. His background includes solutions architecture work for Schneider Electric, NGS and Netwealth.

Tissera is an active participant in the Umbraco open-source community. He organises regular meetups for Umbraco developers across the APAC region and has held Umbraco MVP status for six consecutive years.

Commenting on his new role, Tissera said it marked a milestone in his long involvement with the technology.

"I'm genuinely excited about taking on this new role, which is the culmination of fifteen years working with the Umbraco CMS on both the client and agency side," commented Tissera. "My Umbraco expertise helped me to land my first web developer role in Australia, and I've been organising developer meetups for the past eight years. The opening of the Melbourne office demonstrates Umbraco HQ's commitment to APAC. I'm proud to be leading and growing the team to provide boots on the ground for Umbraco partners, enterprise customers, and the wider Umbraco community in Australia, New Zealand, and the Asia-Pacific region."

Growing APAC base

Umbraco's CMS has operated for two decades as an open-source platform built on Microsoft's .NET framework. It has an active global community of more than 250,000 contributors and users, and a network of partner agencies that develop and maintain customer sites.

The commercial arm of Umbraco develops and supports the core CMS and offers Umbraco Cloud, which is a managed cloud service with regional hosting options. The company says this structure gives organisations a supported platform that continues to receive updates and security fixes.

In the Asia-Pacific region, Umbraco says a growing number of digital agencies use its CMS for large-scale digital projects. Reference customers in the region include Zoos Victoria, which serves around 2.25 million visitors a year, humanitarian aid provider Australia for UNHCR, and circular economy organisation ReMade in Australia.

Umbraco said it chose Melbourne's central business district for the new office to give closer support to partners working on larger projects. The local team will handle requests for proposals, technical demonstrations and proofs of concept for regional clients.

Mats Persson, Chief Executive of Umbraco, said the company saw the appointment of Tissera as significant for its APAC ambitions. "We are thrilled to have someone with Emmanuel's depth of technical expertise, business acumen, community involvement, and interpersonal skills to lead, grow, and strengthen the Umbraco APAC team. He brings more than two decades' experience of guiding strategy, implementing technology, and shaping solutions architecture for leading enterprises. Clients, colleagues and the community can be reassured that they are in safe hands," said Persson.

Umbraco is headquartered in Odense and now has offices in the USA, UK and Australia. It employs more than 150 staff worldwide and plans to expand its APAC team from the new Melbourne base.