Scott Atkinson
Former BigAir chief technology officer Scott Atkinson has launched Tribetech along with Jason Khourey, who was also with BigAir, and Jim Cantor, who was a director at Australian software company Interaage.
Established in early 2018, Tribetech is based in Sydney and offers cyber security services from managed firewalls to dark web monitoring, managed services that cover from server, computer, device and network management and 24/7 help desk and support.
Alongside managed back-up and disaster recovery services, Tribetech also provides cloud services, connectivity and data centre and a procurement portal which is set to offer direct access to "thousands" of IT products.
Atkinson told ARN that the business partners were looking into what is going on in the industry and noticed that many businesses are still not doing IT very well or spending too much time and money when they should be focusing on the business itself.
"They sometimes didn't see IT as a strategic advantage which in some cases could be," Atkinson said. "It seemed that there was still a lot to do in that space."
Tribetech's goal is to go into these organisations and provide them with "solid and stable" IT. The MSP will not only offer IT services but also out at a strategic level to get businesses really moving along.
Atkinson and Cantor worked at IBM until 1994 when they left to start their first managed services provider Netforce, which was acquired by Dimension Data in 2011.
"Since then, we became frustrated by the widening gap between what was being sold and what was actually delivered," the directors explain on Tribetech's website. "By the time most projects went from sales to pre-sales to delivery and finally support, the client often ends up with something that doesn’t always deliver on the original promise."
Atkinson explained they've been working behind the scenes for the past six months in order to build a business that can scale.
"We've been building that sort of modern MSP approach so we're not tide to old ways of doing things," he told ARN. "We've been doing managed services for 20 years and when we started there was some good things and some clunky ways of doing things.
"Some of those clunky things are still around and we need to know that if we are going to scale in our own business we've got to make sure we are automated, efficient and we got the right tools and systems in place to take us forward."
Tribetech has also been able to onboard some customers during this building period and has just hired a senior engineer. The next steps will see the company look for sales engagement, service delivery staff.
