(L-R) Connor O'Rourke, Dave Brown, Ben Scholefield, Craig Howarth, Brendon O'Rourke (Nuago)
The 'ARN Spotlight' series explores partners operating in the local channel landscape right around the country, from Cape York to Hobart, Byron Bay to Fremantle and beyond. In this edition, we focus on South Australia and Adelaide-based managed service provider (MSP) Nuago.
Co-founder and director of sales Connor O’Rourke was one of five founding members of Nuago. While this may seem like too many cooks at first, the broth they serve certainly isn’t spoiled, and in four years the business has a number of successes under its belt.
Moving with the times
Nuago’s journey started back in 2016 with O’Rourke and four others – Ben Scholefield, Craig Howarth, Brendon O'Rourke and Mick O'Rourke – coming together in South Australia after they noticed a gap in the managed services and ICT consultancy space for mid-sized enterprise customers.
“There's a lot of people going out there and consuming software as-a-service or cloud based services, but there wasn't a service wrapper that aligned to that and often used heavy contracts that weren't able to be adjusted as customers transformed their environments,” he said.
“We set out with pretty heavy restraint clauses from our previous employer – we were all associated with a large national and international player previously – and we really wanted to be owners and decision makers in our own destiny, and that started Nuago.”
Although the five founders are all based in South Australia, O’Rourke said the decision to start Nuago in their home state was more than that, as the conditions for the MSP's arrival were ripe with the co-founder and director of sales pointing to the example of car manufacturer Holden, which ultimately closed its Adelaide factory in 2017.
“The manufacturing sector was starting to die off and there was a change in focus towards the defence space and cyber industry, so I think the timing was critical,” he said.
“South Australia needed a revival and a new look in terms of what our state's GDP was focused on, and we really wanted to be a part of the technology and security space.”
Over time, Nuago found their bread and butter in small- to medium-sized corporates and the education sector, and recently found a groove with the defence and government sectors.
Hitting the highs
One of O’Rourke’s crowning achievements was an entire overhaul for Land Services South Australia as it transitioned from a government business to a private one, which started in 2017 and was completed in early 2018.
“With that came an enormous program awards to transform the idea and effectively build a new greenfields organisation on everything from hardware, software — everything in there was ripped out and replaced over a weekend after a six or seven month project to get everything ready to go for that flip over,” he said.
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