From left: Nick Finlayson (Innovo), Paul Thorley (Innovo/Blazeclan) and Amit Bassi (Blazeclan)
Two prominent IT services players, Blazeclan and Innovo, have teamed up to create a cloud services “powerhouse” in Australia.
Global Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner Blazeclan and Australia-grown Innovo have signed a strategic alliance to share customers and expertise in a move that is hoped will enable them to carve a bigger slice of the country’s digital transformation landscape.
Speaking to ARN, an alliance spokesperson said the two companies have "aspirations" to evolve the partnerships to an eventual merger into one entity.
The alliance is spearheaded by ex-Capgemini heavyweights Amit Bassi, who now serves as managing director of Blazeclan Australia and New Zealand, and Nick Finlayson, executive director of Innovo.
Alongside them, former Capgemini Asia Pacific CEO Paul Thorley, who has acted as Innovo chairman since January last year, will now serve as chairman and executive director for the alliance. The three claim to have seen an “opportunity to challenge the industry” and “take key market share from the major systems integrators”.
Founded in 2010 in Pune, India, Blazeclan has a presence across the ASEAN region, Europe and North America, as well as A/NZ, with India serving as its primary delivery centre. The provider recently won a major contract to consolidate 40 years of various technologies into a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform for Education Horizons Group.
Meanwhile, Innovo was co-founded by former Capgemini Australia vice president Finlayson in 2014, and underwent a rebrand and buy-out under the Enex Consulting business. Specialising in open banking, DevOps and testing, the company already has alliances with Blazeclan and Capgemini, as well as vendor partnerships with Salesforce and Mulesoft.
Together, it is hoped the two will be able to leverage expertise on AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure, according to a statement from the duo. They will also share customers including ANZ Bank, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and Latitude Financial.
“Getting fast access to best-of-breed cloud solutions from the likes of AWS – of which Blazeclan is one of Asia Pacific’s most successful consulting partner – is a must-have for our customers,” said Thorley.
Meanwhile, Bassi said the shared cloud services would help the two companies “unlock” the next wave of modernisation for Australian customers.
“We saw a huge opportunity to offer an end-to-end cloud-enabled digital transformation service that starts from strategy through to agile delivery using the same one local team,” he said. “This, in turn, allows the customer to shift to a more dynamic and responsive way of running their business. We do this in a bespoke way, with one localised onshore team that is supported by an offshore team to take on enterprise-sized projects, with 24/7 operations.”
