Axxis, Accord Technologies, Aspirence, D2K Townsville, Netrics, and Anittel. These are the companies that Peter Kazacos’ Hostech has acquired in a year of massive growth.
Now renamed Anittel, the company also had the distinction of forming an advisory board that is headed by Axxis Technology founder, Mathew Dickerson, in 2010.
“The key thing is we’ve demonstrated that we’re continuing to grow the business aggressively,” Anittel chairman, Peter Kazacos, saidin response to the 2010 award win.
“And also we have established a brand that is recognised by not only our customers but our peers as having a premium spot in the SMB landscape.” Anittel has not just enjoyed acquisition growth, however. Organic growth is a big focus for a company that, by Kazacos’ admission, will find it difficult to maintain the acquisition growth rate moving forward.
Despite that Anittel remains in a sound position for organic growth.
“The pleasing part of our business is we’ve gained a lot of customers through acquisitions, and those customers have been buying different types of products,” Kazacos said.
“For instance, some products the customer has are legacy that we don’t sell into the future. In other cases, the customer might not have sampled the variety of products that we currently have available because they were not sold by the previous owners of the businesses. “Our IT customers are buying some of our telephony products, and our telephony customers are buying out IT products. That’s giving us significant organic growth as well as our acquisition growth.”
Moving forward, Kazacos maintains that the SMB space will be a good space to play within, and there is plenty of room for his company to grow as we move into 2011.
“The SMB space is a substantially large enough to continue to provide us our growth going forward even though we feel very well established, there’s still significant white spaces in our target markets,” he said.
“We’re looking at the whole merging of IT and telecommunications and what that merging means to our customers and what sort of products they would want to see in the market.”
And perhaps the NBN will provide a wealth of new opportunities for Kazacos’ business into the future.
As he said to ARN in March this year: “One of the reasons why I think Government is doing the NBN, is to make Australia competitive internationally.
“We’re competing with countries such as Korea, which have much more powerful broadband links than us. In the Asian corridor we need to increase our capability otherwise we really can’t build business.
“We need the NBN to be competitive in the international space. That’s the way it is.”
