Michael van Zoggel (Outcomex)
For a business nestled on the cutting-edge of innovation, defined by the delivery of new and emerging technologies, Outcomex is on track, if not ahead, in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
On track in the sense that technology offerings are evolving, Australian plans are expanding and customers are investing, as the provider powers ahead with a strategy built on reinvention.
Formerly Uplinx Group, the new-look business continues to build out further capabilities within the Internet of Things space, backed up by a move into Victoria and an end-user base hungry for innovation.
“Our business has been built on delivering the latest, most valuable architectures from our vendors,” said Michael van Zoggel, national sales manager of Outcomex.
“That’s been key in the growth and continuous push to remain not only relevant but being seen as a leader in the delivery of solutions which drive positive business outcomes.”
Speaking to ARN during Cisco Live in Melbourne - playing host to more than 7,000 IT professionals - the Sydney-based system integrator specialises in the deployment of enterprise networking, data centre and security solutions, alongside expertise across digital transformation, cloud, collaboration and managed services.
“We differentiate in the market through great engineering, experience and realistic commercial metrics in market,” van Zoggel added. “Our expertise in engineering remains key, as we hold an extremely high amount of vendor certifications.
“In 2018, we are aiming to capitalise on the market move into software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and the new capabilities around software-defined networking (SDN), specifically how it relates to the broader data centre and security architectures.”
During the past 12 months, the business has doubled in size in response to an ongoing stream of customer additions, populating an end-user base that consists of The University of Sydney, City of Sydney and Service NSW, as well as Under Armour, Fuji Xerox and TransGrid among others.
Such expansion is evident through the opening of a Melbourne office, through the purchase and fit-out of a new office in the heart of the city.
As reported by ARN, the business also recruited additional resources, while also upgrading provider panel agreements to support the next stages of growth.
The move stemmed from the realisation that there was an “unfulfilled need” for a solid hyper-specialised Cisco partner in the Victorian marketplace.
Through emulating the success achieved in New South Wales - since the business was founded in 2006 - the Melbourne branch is predominately focused on engineering capabilities, backed up by commercial support sales.
Cisco
Currently, technically certified engineers comprise 75 per cent of the Outcomex business, of which 45 per cent are Cisco certified inter-networking experts (CCIE).
Delving deeper, a large number of senior technical resources are also certified across NetApp, F5, Commvault, Citrix and VMWare technologies, alongside innovation in the cloud through Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
“Our partnership with Cisco has strengthened as we invest together in driving innovation,” van Zoggel added. “We have an extremely tight partner management team and work closely to understand Cisco’s strategy, and therefore align our business to this.
“This makes our approach cohesive and clear from a go-to-market perspective. Cisco is a market leader in key architectures that we have significant experience and expertise in delivering. The technology is sold, the market is stable and the vision is tangible.”
According to van Zoggel, Outcomex leverages deep technical expertise across the entire Cisco technology stack, delivering across the vendor’s four major architecture pillars of collaboration; enterprise network; security and data centre.
“They are all focus areas for our business and we deliver cross portfolio to bring holistic solutions to market,” van Zoggel added.
Customer demands
From a customer perspective, businesses across Australia are focused on utilising new technologies flooding the market, in a bid to drive greater levels of efficiency internally.
Such a focus, according to van Zoggel, is underpinned by a need to lower cost, promote innovation and drive differentiation, alongside raising service delivering metrics.
“Technology, delivered properly, creates efficiencies and provides options to business where they can innovate in their product or services offerings to their customers,” van Zoggel explained.
“This drives differentiation and allows them to capture market share, expand or rationalise cost.”
Specific to technologies, van Zoggel recognised increased levels of investment across data centre and security automation, in addition to threat mitigation.
“Cloud is already pervasive, however creating seamless management in a hybrid cloud environment is also very topical,” van Zoggel added. “Every enterprise customer is pursuing digital transformation in some way shape or form, some far more aggressively than others.
“Also, SDN is becoming mature from a post-conceptual level and our vendors are coming to the table with holistic product sets which allow linkage and automation between the traditional architectures.”
But as new solutions and services saturate the market, van Zoggel acknowledged that challenges remain for customers in 2018, spanning security, boardroom buy-in and return on investment (ROI).
“Purely from an IT perspective, an extremely agile security threat landscape with aggressive proponents is key,” van Zoggel explained. “Also, pulling the board-level executive down the digital transformation path, providing salient and clear direction based on forecasted outcomes to define ROI seems to be difficult.
“We believe this is where the new breed of CIO (chief digital officer etc) is key to assisting the wider business community to understand and gain investment in initiatives.”
James Henderson attended Cisco Live as a guest of Cisco
