Ian Blackburn - Sales Director, Green Light
Pure play services business, Green Light, has rolled out an internal data centre transformation, worth about $5 million, for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The HPE deal was packaged as 23 resources, delivered with Green Light’s full-time equivalents (FTEs).
The deal was made with HPE and CSC, and Green Light will deal with DXC Technologies, the combined entity of HPE and CSC, following their merger.
“It was a whole team of resources that can do data centre transformation from the program manager down. It was packaged up under the consulting service line of ours,” Green Light sales director, Ian Blackburn, told ARN. “It’s one of our larger deals.”
Green Light operates five main service lines: workforce-as-a-service, consulting service, professional services, operational support services, and advisory services.
But this win isn’t a new relationship for the company; it extends on an existing relationship between both businesses.
“We are growing those accounts – we’re in the account development phase. We’ve got a lot of agreements with the big players already so we want to develop the business inside those accounts,” he mentioned.
The company, which was formed in 2007, started its life as a recruitment company, then grew and transformed into a “full blown” services business.
The recruitment side of the business has since been devolved and now sits on a different company name that works independent of Green Light.
Working through the channel, the company deals with global systems integrators, telcos, vendors, defense organisations, and the “big four” consultancies. Some of these businesses include HPE, Telstra, Optus, DXC, Fujitsu, Unisys, Cisco, and VMware.
“Everything we do is white-labelled. We have no end customers. We’ve been on quite an exciting journey over the last four years. So, from a services perspective, we probably started off with about $60,000 in revenue, and that has grown to about $33 million this year,” Blackburn told ARN.
Some of its other notable wins in the last year include a “secured strategic partnership status” with Optus Business in the supply of professional and managed services and becoming a member of the Telstra Partnering Services agreement.
It also replaced more than 15,000 devices nation-wide in various locations, from rural townships to large metropolitan areas for a global financial institution, and helped an IT-based service provider with a desktop deployment for 2000 users across Australia; amongst others.
According to Blackburn, the marketplace is saturated with global partners that use a lot of contractors or recruitment companies that deliver contractors.
“What we’re seeing in the marketplace is the drive to organisations that can deliver an outcome," he said. "We put the governance layers on top of those resources to deliver on an outcome. That’s where the market is playing – it has got to be as-a-service.
“These sort of wins show our evolving trust with our partners. We work strategically with them to have a better outcome, enabling us to grow and invest more in technology-led solutions. There’s a whole range of models we can adopt to support our partners,” he added.
Going forward, Green Light aims to further solution problems that its customers have.
“Within the SI space, we’re seeing right-sizing in the workforce. This will lead to capability loss within their own businesses, and they need organisations that can step up to them and fill the holes that are left. Hopefully, by working at the architectural layer, we can help them more.”
“Everything will become more solution led. At the moment, it’s a capability that’s packaged as-a-service but we’ve got to help them start developing the solution itself. That’s going to be a massive step up from our competitors,” he said.
The company is growing towards an IPO in 2020 and has plans to expand into New Zealand in six to 12 months.
Other plans on the roadmap include expansions of state offices into Victoria and/or Queensland, Asia-Pacific offices, then moving into other geographies such as the EMEA, then the US post 2020.
