After spending 19 years at Oracle, Chris Downie decided it was time to leave, and along with other co-founders, took on the task of launching an Oracle-focused Cloud consultancy business, PrimeQ.
Launched in January, the business specialises in ERP Cloud and includes Downie as CTO/ director of Cloud solutions, CEO Andrew McAdams, COO Mike Luyckx, CFO Simon Cohen and director of cloud, annuity and licensing, Andrew Treloar.
All up, the company has about 48 staff with ambitions to grow to 100 by Christmas and then up to 200 employees in the next 12 months, Downie said.
“We’re in a high growth phase and what’s important to us, is focusing on delivering value to our customers,” he said.
PrimeQ has offices in Adelaide and Melbourne, as well as people on the ground in Auckland, Sydney and Brisbane. It also has innovation centres within its Melbourne and Adelaide offices.
“What really prompted us to start the business was that we were looking at all the Cloud solutions available in the market and the solutions that Oracle has, all their newly released products and thought no one was really going out there and exclusively embracing it,” Downie said. “Some partners were looking at doing Cloud as an adjunct to their on-premise business, but no partner had really come out and said ‘we’re a Cloud-based partner this is what we do’.”
Downie said it has had a bit of early customer success so far and there were a lot of opportunities in the pipeline in government, large enterprise and mid-market organisations.
“Our core focus was in ERP, but we’re now embracing other adjunct Cloud solutions that fit nicely with that,” he said. “Oracle has a vast portfolio of Cloud solutions so there’s plenty there for us to explore and then down the track we might look at some acquisitions that will complement our capability.”
“Selling Cloud is a very different business model, because you have to be quick and productive, do shorter projects and more of them, then look at what else you can add value to in relation to that customer.”
