Daniel Williams - Contino Asia-Pacific director of engineering
Professional services company, Contino, has established operations in Australia, with the opening of its first new office for the trans-Tasman region in Melbourne.
Heading up the company is Daniel Williams, who now holds the title of Asia-Pacific director of engineering.
Founded in 2014, Contino specialises in DevOps and transformation, with offices already established in the US and UK, and is backed by a US-based venture capital, Columbia Capital.
“We’re a start-up but we have grown rapidly," Williams told ARN.
"Our governments are undertaking digital transformations and this is largely mirrored from the US and the UK. So, we’ve seen this pattern play out in these geographies and Australia is a lucrative market for us."
Another reason Contino picked Australia to expand into was the growing rate of cloud adoption.
“Cloud adoption is going through the roof in Australia and the country is a key market within Asia," Williams said.
"We’ve also got a view to quickly expand into Asia and this office in Melbourne facilitates that.
“We’re already looking at the wider Asia-Pacific region, including Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. Our focus now, is to create a number of success stories in Australia, and we’re looking at New Zealand too."
According to Williams, the company has been seeing demand from its customers in the US and the UK to extend their partnerships into Australia.
“We’re a huge AWS partner, particularly in the transformation space. Some of our other partnerships are with Docker, and HashiCorp,” he said.
A key area of focus for the company will be the insurance, telecommunications, retail, banking, and investment banking, and it will be working with huge enterprises.
“We’re an enterprise-focused professional services company and we don’t make our own tools. We want to particularly focus in the financial services market. These industries found us, it’s where our successes are in the other regions. It’s where the demand is grown from.”
The company is looking to hire more staff, particularly engineers.
“We have numerous hires in the pipeline but as we’re mostly focusing on engineering, we are looking to hire the best engineers in the market," Williams said.
"Our environment is very different to a consultancy in that there’s such a scarcity in talent in this area.
“So, we’ve created an environment that is led by engineers, and don’t have a traditional salesforce,” he said.
The company will be releasing more information about its upcoming customer wins at a later date.
“We want to find some landmark customers in Australia that demonstrate our capability," Williams said. "It’s about saying yes to the right opportunities and staying within our strengths. We want to make sure our message gets into the marketplace.”
Williams is tasked with the responsibility of securing the “highest calibre” of engineers, in addition to securing more customers for the company in this region. He moved back to Australia, from the Contino office in the UK, to put more weight behind the tech sector.
Some of his other stints include working at Sapient Global Markets, The Net-A-Porter Group, JP Morgan, TIbra Capital, and HSBC, in various DevOps roles.
