David Abouhaidar (AC3)
Technology partner, AC3, will soon be pushing hard into the Federal Government space, following its contractual successes within the State Government vertical and other areas of play.
AC3 commercial sales director, David Abouhaidar, told ARN that the HP partner, which has a dominant play in the New South Wales market, will be expanding its reach into the Canberra geography as a result of this revamped strategy to infiltrate the federal government space.
“We’ve been seriously fine-tuning our managed services offerings, and we want to take what we’re doing today, air-lift it and do it in Canberra to target the Federal Government space. We also want to set up a Canberra presence to support that,” Abouhaidar said.
“We haven’t been doing much work in the Federal Government market and want to give shape to this part of our business. We’re out there hunting the big fish in the managed services space,” he said.
In addition to HP, the company also has Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Cisco, Microsoft, Lenovo, Citrix, and recently added Dell into its vendor portfolio.
AC3 has existing partnerships with outsourcing organisations, which has resulted in wins for the company within the state government space. According to Abouhaidar, AC3 will be following the same model and partnerships strategy as it embarks on this new route.
“Federal Government hasn’t really adopted NSW State Government policy of everything as a service," Abouhaidar said. "They’re starting to talk about it now and are beginning to take it more seriously.
“The NSW State Government space is very managed services contract-centric. Everything is as a service with what they’re doing. With government, it’s mandated so, if we don’t get in there early enough, we’re going to miss the boat.
“We want to be there when that comes into fruition,” he mentioned.
According to Abouhaidar, the push to have a security conversation as a managed service provider also resulted in this move.
“We want to be at the curve when it’s ready," Abouhaidar said. "There’s plenty of paranoia around security and it is the number one thing on peoples’ minds. And let’s face it, cloud providers aren’t silver bullets.
“Everything we do has a security offering behind it and there is a strict security policy around it too,” he said.
In the last six months, AC3 has signed up about 12 customers on contracted revenue, with growth in its transactional hardware customer base as well, having signed on about 10 customers there. All these customers are mainly in New South Wales.
“We’re not national, we have been focusing heavily into the New South Wales and Queensland space and for us, now, Canberra is next on our list,” he added.
“We are a trusted provider for what we do. We can’t rest on our laurels, we have to keep reinventing and can’t lose focus that’s how we stay relevant.”
Going forward, Abouhaidar stated that the company will be looking to further on board more vendors into its portfolio, especially if it adds value to the AC3 business, its customers and its strategy.
“Never say never; we’re after vendors with a focus on security, those that believe in having an annuity revenue stream, and are niche enough to tap into storage or compute and make it more cost effective for customers,” he told ARN.
Towards the end of last year, AC3 was awarded with a service provider award from HPE and was inducted into the exclusive Cisco’s Winner’s Circle as part of the Cisco Partner Program.
