Each month, ARN examines the companies that have risen to prominence or are progressing beyond their start-up origins.
This regular column looks at partners on the upward move - these are companies to watch.
Itoc
NUMBER OF STAFF: 13
AGE OF COMPANY: Four years
PRODUCTS/SOLUTIONS IT BRINGS TO MARKET:
"Itoc is a Cloud integrator and solution company. We help organisations differentiate and disrupt by architecting, implementing and managing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud solutions that underpin and drive innovation in their products and services. We believe enabling is as important as delivering.
"We take our clients on a results-focused journey through our full life-cycle of Cloud services including proof of concept, Cloud enablement, rapid workload migration, cost optimisation, managed DevOps, and Cloud transformation services."
BUSINESS DIFFERENTIATOR:
"We’re invested in our clients and our industry, and have the expertise and experience to help our clients deliver outcomes in the Cloud today, and navigate whatever challenges may be around the corner tomorrow.
"Being a nimble Cloud services provider with a “born-in- the-Cloud” culture gives us an advantage and our clients find our flexibility a refreshing engagement."
FUTURE PLANS:
"In working closely with AWS, we will vigorously develop and offer services that allow our clients to focus on listening to their customers, and enables them to launch and iterate disruptive and differentiating products and services."
KEY MESSAGE TO THE CHANNEL IN 2016:
"No provider in our industry can afford to sit still. Our clients are constantly challenging us to provide thought leadership and competitive advantage through a trusted partnership.
The next year will see the emergence of “serverless computing” as an application architecture of choice, which will present a challenge to the traditional MSP model."
Strut Digital
NUMBER OF STAFF: 22
AGE OF COMPANY: Three years
PRODUCTS/SOLUTIONS IT BRINGS TO MARKET:
"We bring to market managed services and professional services leveraging the AWS Cloud platform. We are about to release our Cloud management tool called Strutify that will automate common (and important) but mundane administration tasks within AWS environments."
BUSINESS DIFFERENTIATOR:
"We have two key business differentiators - our expertise in automation and our breadth of industry coverage. While many other providers choose to focus on solutions specific to certain industry sectors or verticals, we apply our expertise in automation across a number of sectors."
FUTURE PLANS:
"Our primary focus is to expand in the financial and digital sectors and also to leverage that expertise into the education and government sectors, which we see as having similar needs and characteristics.
"We are also looking to grow our UK operation and enter other overseas markets. Finally, we are seeking to expand the capabilities of our Cloud management tool, Strutify."
KEY MESSAGE TO THE CHANNEL IN 2016:
"Embrace disruption. Recent conversations with customers and channel partners have all been very similar – they operate in markets that have been disrupted and they are being forced to find new ways to remain relevant to their customer base and maintain or grow their revenue.
"Companies will need to embrace change and recognise the opportunities just to survive, let alone grow."
Globalnet Solutions Australia
NUMBER OF STAFF: 15 (including five contractors)
AGE OF COMPANY: 14 years
PRODUCTS/ SOLUTIONS IT BRINGS TO MARKET:
"We focus on delivering high quality and added-value IT solutions including server, storage, networking and security solutions; Cloud and disaster recovery solutions; resource management; managed services; and application development services (Web, mobile, Microsoft (.Net)).
"We partner with major vendors including Dell, HP, Juniper, Novell, Microsoft, VMware, and Kaspersky.
"Having these partnerships allows us to receive pre-sales expertise, as well as pre-sales design and proposal assistance. The range of our vendor portfolio has enabled us to increase the breadth of the solutions that we offer to our customers."
BUSINESS DIFFERENTIATOR:
"Our core strength is our focus on improving efficiency and productivity for our customers, whilst reducing their internal resource requirements.
"Adding application development to our portfolio has been important to our focus on supporting customers with a spread of solutions – this has introduced for us a differentiating element from other organisations that focus on either hardware fulfilment or application development as two distinct areas."
FUTURE PLANS:
"We’ve been working very closely with our value add distributors such as Hemisphere Technologies (Kaspersky and layered security products) that have a lot to offer us by way of expanding our offerings towards a layered security approach.
"With this enablement and activation, we’ll be looking to grow our office footprint across Australia through an increased push across geographical lines."
KEY MESSAGE TO THE CHANNEL IN 2016:
"The key is to focus on two areas – internally and the channel. With a management team supported by a group of highly experienced technical specialists, we are constantly evolving to ensure we’re able to continue to provide complete solutions to our customers."
IntegrationWorks
NUMBER OF STAFF: 55 across Australia and New Zealand
AGE OF COMPANY: 12 years
PRODUCTS/SOLUTIONS IT BRINGS TO MARKET:
"We drive digital transformation and streamlined systems integration for enterprises, with an expertise in integrating on-premise, Cloud and hybrid Cloud environments.
"We also offer integration managed services, which includes a maturity assessment alongside a bundle of integration expertise and technologies, available in a monthly fixed-fee subscription based delivery model."
BUSINESS DIFFERENTIATOR:
"We custom build integration solutions dependent on our client’s objectives with a vendor agnostic approach. Our consulting, technical and managed service teams get involved in many integration technologies, architectural patterns, development practises and support.
"The end results include seamless integration platforms, enhanced capability of historical systems, digital transformation and the ability to bring on new digital channels."
FUTURE PLANS:
"Our clients increasingly wish to see quantifiable progress as we mature their integration capabilities. In response to that demand and following a few years of incubator work, we will soon be launching our new integration maturity assessment model to market, across all verticals."
KEY MESSAGE TO THE CHANNEL IN 2016:
"The speed of change in today’s technology environment means what is useful today is not built for the technology of the future. Businesses need to think “integration first” when adding, buying or transforming their systems to save money, time and optimise their current systems.
"A fully mature and integrated environment increases business efficiency, revenue generation, digital transformation and keeps you competitive."
