(L-R) Connor O'Rourke, Dave Brown, Ben Scholefield, Craig Howarth, Brendon O'Rourke (Nuago)
When recovering from major disruption, it’s important to think about the next steps forward, and Nuago has picked up that while customers are looking forward, they’re “not looking too far out in the distance”.
This is according to co-founder and director of sales Connor O’Rouke, who claims cash management and longevity are the top priorities of the Adelaide-based managed service provider’s (MSP) executive customers at the moment.
But as the environment changes, sometimes from day to day, with lockdowns and social distancing measures adapting to meet the relevant circumstances, he said that those executives aren’t thinking too far ahead.
“COVID shone the spotlight on IT departments and technologies that have been invested in and unfortunately some simply didn’t stack up,” O’Rourke said.
“We see a dramatic increase for managed services currently and a drive to be fully mobile. Spend will decrease in certain sectors, but for the most part there will be a shift in focus around value being returned from IT assets and technology personnel investment, so this would lead to a reallocation of funding rather than a decrease.”
In addition to mobility, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is another area that O’Rourke has seen a lot of demand for. With the nature of the coronavirus pandemic however, there hasn't been enough time for planning and detailed designs, so Nuago is striving to invest time into ensuring customer’s environments are available, secure and scalable.
On the whole, O’Rourke considers Nuago’s approach to be relatively unchanged by the pandemic, with the exception of fielding an increase in demand for collaborative technologies.
“The distributed workforce is here to stay, so we will continue to focus on technologies and strategies that help to enable this,” he said.
“From what the market is showing us at the moment, is the tech firms that had their house in order from a strategic, procedural, personnel and cash perspective will continue to gain market share.
“Those that were flying too close to the sun unfortunately may not make it out the other side of this challenging economy. Adaptability and agility are a couple of the key attributes of the tech providers that will be successful into the future.”
What the pandemic also hasn’t changed is focusing on both customer retention and acquisition.
“There is a saying that if you aren’t growing you are dying,” O’Rourke added.
ARN Advance is a centralised editorial resource designed to help partners access forward-looking content as the Australian market attempts to reposition for growth.
