Counterparts Technology managing director, Matt Wynn Jones
Sydney-based partner, Counterparts Technology, has boosted its core area of focus to include consulting, advisory, professional, and managed services - a major expansion from its initial market focus, which was primarily around procurement.
As such, the company now has three cores to the business: consulting advisory; procurement and vendor management; as well as professional and managed services.
Counterparts Technology managing director, Matt Wynn-Jones, told ARN the three-year old company recently went through a transition as a result of changing market conditions and needs.
“This transition allowed us to go from strength to strength," Wynn-Jones said. "The core was first established and the focus now is on being a broader provider to our customers because the market’s changing and that’s what it is demanding. That has given us a razor sharp focus to go to market with those three principles.
“So that shift, for us as consultants or advisors, allows us to have a broader understanding of business in a technology context, rather than technology for technology sake,” he said.
According to Wynn-Jones, this revised focus has resulted in the company having more business conversations around how technology can support procurement, rather than the traditional conversations with IT departments about consumption of technology.
“We now engage with our clients on all three fronts at one go sometimes and at other times, one leads to another then leads to another," Wynn-Jones said.
“The consulting advisory piece allows us to talk to businesses and to be able to engage at a strategic level on a transformation journey. That could be as easy as mobility solutions for their staff, or maybe an entire re-platforming of their sales platform.
“So, we engage with businesses quite deeply, not necessarily just within IT. We spend most of our time with business units, understanding the business and developing a strategy. Once we have that, we then leverage our relationships with our partners," he said.
With a team of nine people across Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, Counterparts Technology also works with 15 specialist consulting partners.
“The members of our team have been across the channel, so bringing that together to have a good portfolio of people,” he said.
The HP Inc. partner also has other vendors including HPE, Microsoft Surface, Apple, Trend Micro and Lenovo in its portfolio.
“We try to narrow down our partner engagement to focused vendor partners, and they’re mostly around the Microsoft platform. A lot of these partnerships are client driven as to not necessarily provide vendor solutions but understanding what the customer requires and then finding the best solution.”
Wynn-Jones also told ARN that the company has recently signed on new customers and is working with GovDC (NSW Government Data Centres) to assist a number of government agencies in the transition from their onsite data centres into GovDC.
“So, the server and storage piece becomes more important there rather than the desktop; it is addressing the desktop and the server and storage ends of the market. The procurement model that we provide allows it to have the right hybrid model of some on-prem, some in GovDC and some in cloud and it can all be consumed on a cost per user per month basis,” Wynn-Jones added.
Counterparts Technology is also engaged in the financial services, mortgage broker and not for profit sectors. It’s currently doing several deployments in this space with HP Inc.
“But not all customers cover across all three of our business units; it’s providing a service with a particular offer and at the right time, working towards rolling that out across the board,” he mentioned.
Moving forward, Counterparts Technology aims to build on its collaboration partner base, boost its strategic vendor portfolio, and increase its company growth.
“For us, moving forward, it’s around focusing on our maturity and collaboration with specialist partners. We have no qualms with collaborating with other partners and our goal is to broaden that," Wynn-Jones said.
“We’re in the process of securing a strategic arrangement with a communication provider in Melbourne offering fixed line, mobile, and data services. That’s a fantastic plug in for us. So we look forward to building on that.
“We also want to organically grow our team into other states in Australia and are continually looking at new innovations and how we can bring that into our vendor portfolio to provide a better outcome for our customers," he added.
