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NOVEMBER 2016 | Vol. 21 No. 10NOVEMBER 2016 | V lV 21 N 10NOVEMBER 2016 | Vol.VV 21 No.NN 10

CONTRIBUTORS

AREG ALIMIAN

CHRIS STEPHENS

CHRISTINE ADAMS

CRYSTAL VALENTINE

DAVID HIGGINS

MATTHEW BRIGHAM

SIMON HOWE

STEPHEN MILTHORPE

STUART APPLEGATE

TONY JARVIS

INTERVIEWS

ANDREW MAMONITIS

ANTHONY STEVENS

BEN JOHNSON

BRADEN VOIGT

CRAIG RANDALL

CRAIG SIMS

DAVE SLUTZKIN

DAVID CROTTY

DAVID MERCHANT

DOMINIC WHITEHAND

FAITH REES

JULIE BARBIERI

KEN STRUTHERS

LEE GOODMAN

MARK BLOWER

MARK REES

NICK ROCHE

STEFAN JANSEN

STEPHEN JONES

STUART STRICKLAND

Rise of the ISVVERSENT - SPINNING OFF TO SUCCEED

DEVICEDESKBUILDING AN AUSTRALIAN ISV

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arnnet.com.au | NOVEMBER 2016 |

CONTENTS 1

NovemberREGULARS

4 Editorial46 Channel Coaching47 Secret Reseller62 Community

COLUMNS

8 Competing in today’s software market

Everyone is in the application software business

in Australia, making it one of the fastest-growing

segments of the IT industry, according to research

analyst firm Gartner.

30 Partner round-up - Coastal Queensland

Resellers up and down the Queensland coastline

are grappling with cloud offerings – LEON SPENCER

investigates.

44 The Hot List

ARN looks at some of the companies that have risen

to prominence already or are progressing beyond

their start-up origins. HAFIZAH OSMAN looks at

partners on the upward move – these are companies

to watch.

54 Tech Watch – Securing the Internet of Things

IoT is changing how both operational and strategic

security decisions are executed – HAFIZAH

OSMAN investigates.

ANALYSIS

6 Taking the agile angle in software

There’s more than one way to skin the proverbial

cat, and the same can be said for software

development – LEON SPENCER reports.

26 Aligning with AWS

In support of global expansion plans, Xero general

manager of platform architecture and delivery, Mark

Rees, explains to JAMES HENDERSON why vendor

alignment is crucial in the cloud.

28 Finding the ISV sweet spot

As the industry edges towards cloud, JAMES

HENDERSON uncovers an emerging business playing

a pivotal role in enabling channel success.

INTERVIEWS

10 Building an Australian ISV

Software innovation is top of agenda in Australia today,

with a host of new businesses emerging to service a

blossoming market – HOLLY MORGAN reports.

14 Made to order

When it comes to software development, ongoing

value can be found in individuality – Intergy

Consulting managing director, David Crotty,

explains why to LEON SPENCER.

18 The power of the product

The rise of cloud is forcing IT providers to make bold

bets, innovating from within in the pursuit of growth

– CHRIS PLAYER identifies a leader in the pack.

22 Providing a platform for ISV innovation

As chief advocates of the ISV, Amazon Web Services

channel alliances manager, Stefan Jansen, outlines

to JAMES HENDERSON how the cloud vendor is

providing a platform for innovation.

32 A next-generation approach to distribution

As the industry advocates for new ways of

thinking within the channel, HOLLY MORGAN

tests the theory in distribution.

36 ARN Hall of Fame – Dominic Whitehand

Fresh from being inducted into the ARN Hall of Fame,

Exclusive Networks managing director, Dominic

Whitehand, explains to JAMES HENDERSON why

hidden in an apparent weakness, is always a strength.

FEATURES

38 Creating cloud clarity in the channel

In the world of cloud, the next steps to partner

progression remain unknown, creating a

greater need for clarity in the channel –

JAMES HENDERSON reports.

48 Building an MSP Business

As traditional box-shifting models erode

over time, resellers are finding motivation in

building a managed service provider business –

HAFIZAH OSMAN reports.

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4 EDITORIAL

Rise of the ISV

A s the curtain slowly comes

down on 2016, and the

channel takes stock of the

twelve months past, one long-lasting

memory will remain.

Forget Dell’s historic acquisition

of EMC, Microsoft taking control of

LinkedIn or even Tech Data entering

Australian, three letters best

summarise a changing shift within

the local market. I-S-V.

While the independent software

vendor isn’t a new-fangled term -

rather a relic of the past - its role

within the channel is heightening,

as vendors seek partners capable of

building customised and specialised

industry solutions in light of

applications becoming the new

currency of the enterprise.

Underpinned by the increased value

of apps, vendors are aligning with

ISVs and developers to access new

areas of the market.

Billed as the shadow channel

by many, the rising importance of

the ISV brings new meaning to how

traditional partners go-to-market,

disrupting the linear supply chain of

years gone by.

Driven by cloud-first vendors

such as Amazon Web Services

(AWS), Microsoft, Salesforce,

Google and IBM, ISVs represent a

broad, diverse and growing group

of companies that are displaying

influence across lines of business,

irrespective of size.

But as the market finally appears

to catch up and take a breath,

forward-thinking vendors are now

fighting to attract and retain ISV

talent, providing a platform that

fosters creativity and innovation.

Best emphasising the importance

of apps within this context,

Salesforce now refers to its ISVs as

App Innovation Partners, reflecting

becoming channel superstars, with

vendors clamouring to create cloud-

friendly environments to ensure

ongoing growth.

Consequently, software

innovation sits top of the agenda in

Australia today, with a host of new

businesses emerging to service a

blossoming market.

One such start-up is Devicedesk,

which creates process and

productivity analytics software

for businesses across Australia,

leveraging the Microsoft Azure

platform.

At the other end of town, we

outline how Intergy Consulting

designs unique software solutions

for customers on a case-by-case

basis, before handing over the

Intellectual Property (IP) rights.

But there’s more than one way

to skin the proverbial cat, and the

same can be said for software

development, as explained

by Empired.

Meanwhile, Xero showcases

its innovation on the AWS Cloud,

while cloud-first innovator SixPivot

summarises the six steps required

for ISVs to build software products

for commercial production.

Collectively, this issue serves

to investigate the partners coming

out of the channel shadows,

rising to prominence in a cloud

dominated world.

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James Henderson,Editor, ARN

another shift in focus.

Designed to change the narrative

about what these third parties can

do when engaging with Salesforce,

the new term aims to illustrate how

its channel is leveraging its platform

to build applications, components,

templates and companies.

While Salesforce bucks the trends

from a naming perspective, the

importance of application building

partners is growing in importance

across the vendor spectrum.

Now seen as the lifeblood of

many vendor, ISVs are extending

platforms in new and exciting ways,

selling applications through online

marketplaces and stores.

Australian innovationWith vendors seeking specialised

channel expertise, our cover story

this month features one partner

paving the way for global growth

through building unique offerings on

the AWS cloud.

Step forward Stax, a spin

off product and business of

Melbourne-based cloud consulting

partner, Versent.

“We knew that the products in the

market currently weren’t doing the

job,” Stax general manager, Dave

Slutzkin, said.

“Businesses were not getting

value out of the tools they were using

to manage AWS environments, and

it became clear that there was a big

gap in the market.”

Emphasising the value of

constructing new applications

and tools on cloud platforms,

Stax represents the new breed

of partner grabbing the attention

of leading vendors.

As outlined by Amazon Web

Services head of channels and

alliances, Stefan Jansen, ISVs are

“Three letters best summarise a changing shift within the local market”

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6 ISV/EMPIRED

Many projects suit an agile approach, while others are perfect candidates for the

waterfall model.When Stuart Strickland came to

co-found Perth-based IT consulting firm, Conducive, in 2006, his software development background was predominantly steeped in the conventional waterfall methodology.

In short, the model is a sequential software design process, based on a steady downward flow through the phases of conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing, production and implementation along with maintenance.

Through the influence of his Conducive co-founders however, Strickland learned that the relatively newer agile approach to software development could offer a different, and crucially more effective, way of doing things – depending on the nature of the job.

While newer than the waterfall model, the agile development approach is nothing new to the IT industry, which has seen the approach come to dominate large chunks of the market.

Its iterative, team-based approach to creating software has won over many fans.

And for good reason; it can enable the incremental delivery of features which, in turn can facilitate a greater speed to market.

It also offers an enormous amount of flexibility for customers to pick and choose features as a software project takes shape.

Conversely, the waterfall approach dictates a linear approach to the creation of digital solutions and platforms typically marked several stages, each of which needs to be completed before the next can begin.

Both development models lend themselves well to different sorts of projects.

The waterfall approach, for example, can suit large integration projects, with multiple systems that need to talk to each other.

“There’s no point trying to do that in an agile fashion, because you need that specified up-front, very clearly about what the system is going to send and what it is going to receive,” Strickland said.

Equally, the agile technique can work well for a whole range of projects, including software involving websites, reports, screens, and scenarios where multiple iterations of a solution will help to drive a solution

towards its intended goals in a short or limited timeframe.

The company that Strickland co-founded over a decade ago adopted the agile approach upon its inception.

It is this methodology he and his team has since rolled out through Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)-listed IT services provider, Empired, after it acquired Conducive for almost $8 million in 2012.

As a local independent software vendor, Empired approaches many, if not all, of its software development projects from an agile perspective – only adopting a waterfall approach when required.

“I’ve spent 20-odd years doing projects in all various manners, such as agile and waterfall, and I find agile gives a far better result,” said Strickland who now acts as general manager of Western Australia, at Empired.

“The user gets something at the end, which is very closely aligned to their business need.”

Whether it takes an agile approach or not, Empired builds much of its software off the back of some of the industry’s most popular platforms such as Java, and Microsoft’s .NET framework, while also employing

There’s more than one way to skin the proverbial cat, and the same can be said for software development - Leon Spencer reports.

Taking the agile angle in software

Through established relationships

with key vendors such as

Microsoft and Red Hat, Empired

offers expertise across a range of

technology solutions, from unified

communications to the Internet

of Things.

Specialising in Microsoft

deployments – spanning Office

365, SharePoint, Dynamics, Azure

and SQL Server – the company

services customers across a

range of industries in Australia,

which include:

• Education

• Financial Services and Insurance

• Health

• Mining

• Public Sector

• Retail and Manufacturing

• Utilities

Empired Expertise


EMPIRED/ISV 7

integration tools, such as Red Hat’s JBoss middleware.

Using these tools, Empired’s 300-strong customer software development team creates new solutions for clients from scratch.

At the same time, the company sometimes opts to resell existing solutions to clients, depending on the requirements of the job and the budget.

An agile processWhile the agile approach to development comes with its own set of challenges, Empired implements a tailored process to ensure everything flows smoothly.

Initially, the team will sit down and do a scoping workshop with the client, producing a set of user stories – short descriptions of features as described from the perspective of the client – and also drawing up the high level architecture.

Upon conclusion of the work, which might take anything from a week to months, depending on the size of the system, the company will have the high-level architecture and the user stories complete.

“From that we can do a very accurate estimation, and we’re quite happy at that stage to fix the price and delivery of that piece of work,” Strickland said.

Then come the sprints – a set period of time within which a specific piece of work has to be done.

“We go through and we do that delivery in an agile fashion,” he said. “Even though it’s a fixed price piece of work, we’ll sit down with the user at the start of each sprint, and we’ll review the user stories we can deliver in that sprint, and we’ll let them decide which ones get delivered.”

Although the price is generally fixed by this stage, clients can swap in any new user stories, as long as they take one out which is approximately the same size.

The early, quick delivery of iterations under the agile model gives Strickland and his team the wiggle room to alter elements of the project on the fly.

“Through the agile methodology we try to deliver very early and very quickly to the client,” he added. “They’ll start seeing the system at the end of

four weeks. And every four weeks we’ll aim to deliver that system.

“As they [clients] are seeing it, they’ll then start to realise what they really want.”

As long as the minimal viable product elements are being delivered, a lot of finessing can be carried out, even in the early stages.

Battling the consThe benefits of the agile approach are commonly understood; it’s flexible, fast and innovative. But there are drawbacks too, many of which can be alleviate with good project management.

“Certainly, there’s always a challenge around technology and architecture risk,” Strickland said. “One thing with working in that [agile] fashion and not knowing everything up front is that it is difficult to design how the overall system needs to behave.

“We solve that in the first sprint by tackling all the more difficult and technically challenging requirements, so that any architectural issues emerge early, and we’ve got the rest of the project to, if necessary, make changes.

“And we’re not locking ourselves into a technology that isn’t fit for purpose.”

For Strickland, making sure a project sees the development of the minimum viable product is paramount, providing the end-user with something usable, within the bounds of the fixed, agreed-upon cost.

However, not all projects go quite this smoothly.

“The biggest failing of many agile projects is that they go on forever at the end,” Strickland added. “There’s a very strict methodology to running an agile project correctly, and many companies just see agile as a way of not having a project manager, and not having to govern a project.

“There is nowhere to hide in agile, but during a big waterfall project, nobody’s checking up on you.”


8 ANALYSIS/GARTNER

IF YOU’RE SEEKING TO ENTER OR EXPAND SHARE IN APPLICATION MARKETS, IT’S IMPORTANT TO:

• Plan for sustained, significant investment in product innovation, sales and marketing

• Look constantly for white space – new features and functionality, use cases and delivery models – that allow you to extend and add value to your installed base

• Build for the business buyer. The business buyer evolution has already occurred for applications. Designing for and marketing/selling to business buyers is no longer a novelty – it’s table stakes.

• Shift focus from cloud to what cloud enables. The cloud evolution has already occurred for applications. If you don’t have a cloud-based offering, make that your innovation priority. If you do, then start thinking ahead to what you can enable for customers through this model.

• Start building out developer and partner ecosystems as rapidly as you can afford it. Ecosystem development is crucial to creating new markets, building out customer relationships and ultimately driving new revenue.

By Christine Adams

E veryone is in the application software

business, making it the fastest-growing

segment of the IT industry.

This creates sustained, intense pressure to grow

and innovate. Competing in this market requires a

relentless focus on extending and adding value to

the installed base.

As digital business proliferates, application

providers will need to do more than improve

on their existing installed base. Instead, they’ll

need to support and enable their customers’

digital transformation.

Investment strategiesApplication providers are always looking for white

space – the next unmet or undiscovered need they

can fill to increase installed base sales. It’s not

surprising that digital business is viewed as an

opportunity to create entirely new markets. While

many providers have these powerful ambitions, their

investment strategies may be insufficient to achieve

the desired disruption.

Growth and investment priorities in applications are

defined by the need to create new revenue from:

• First-time implementations;

• New or expanded functionality;

• Expanded units, users and use cases for existing

implementations; and

• Replacements

Software leaders who can quickly find a way

to invest more or differently on their digital

endeavours and learn how to innovate and

fail faster will have an advantage over less

nimble competitors.

Effective partner and developer ecosystems are

also essential to expanding the installed base, as

well as to develop new functionality and use cases.

Start building out these ecosystems as rapidly as

you can afford it.

It’s important to note, however, that

Competingin today’s software market

digital business ecosystems are much more

diverse and interconnected than traditional,

transactional developer and integrator

partner networks.

Spending on innovationWhile application software businesses emphasise

customer engagement in innovation plans, product

and service innovation remains the long-term

priority. This doesn’t imply that they are unconcerned

with customer engagement.

Rather, they may see better return on their

innovation spend from meeting demand for

new functionality.

As long as the economics of the application

software business demand a steady stream

of new or enhanced functionality to maximise

installed base revenue, providers will spend

on innovation.

It’s important to distinguish between the types of

innovation, separating real, leading-edge product

and business model innovation from what’s really

renovation of existing products.

Changing business modelsMany software application businesses have

changed their business model as a result of

digital transformation.

New software pricing models and increased

use of free trials are often the two biggest changes

made. Free trials are already “table stakes” for

new functionality.

Gartner predicts that virtually all new analytic

software purchases by 2017, for example, will begin

as a free or low-cost proof of concept, enabling

buyers to try before they buy.

That said, the track record for converting free

trials to paid subscriptions is generally thought to

be in the low single digits.

By Christine Adams – managing vice president, Gartner

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10 ISV/ DEVICEDESK

When documenting the rapid rise of a technology start-up, the cutting-edge

creativity of an entrepreneur is best captured through the flickering glow of new ideas.

Yet for Anthony Stevens, in building an Australian-made independent software vendor (ISV), Devicedesk was not a light bulb idea.

Rather a process of working through parts of a jigsaw puzzle, wondering what can and should be different in IT.

“There are always challenges when starting a business,” Stevens acknowledged.

Founded in late 2014, the Melbourne-based company creates process and productivity analytics software for businesses of all sizes across Australia, striking key vendor partnerships with Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday and Zendesk along the way.

Despite being young at heart, the Devicedesk team has collectively spent decades assessing how to instigate fundamental enterprise change, utilising emerging technologies such as hyper-scale computing, big data and machine learning.

Essentially, Stevens is tapping into the industry’s insatiable appetite for cloud application services, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) forecast to grow 20.3 per cent in 2016, reaching $US37.7 billion globally.

“We have seen big changes in how organisations use SaaS vendors such as

Salesforce, Workday and Microsoft,” Stevens said.

“Through the advancements in new technologies, we believe there’s an ongoing opportunity to allow organisations to better understand its use of software across the entire business.”

Targeting the “more progressive CIO”, Devicedesk represents a new breed of Australian start-ups, start-ups built from the ground up with software innovating from the epicentre.

Operating as an enterprise catalogue platform for IT services, software and devices, Stevens said Devicedesk draws inspiration from leading consumer online experiences, before bringing them into the Australian enterprise.

“Organisations sign up for licenses with different providers, deploy these licenses internally but then struggle to assess usage rates which subsequently makes it difficult to attach value to the investment,” he explained.

InsightcentrUnderpinning Devicedesk’s offering is Insightcentr, which marks the company’s entry into the Internet of Things and analytics market.

As a recently released SaaS solution, Insightcentr is designed to allow businesses to better understand software utilisation and workforce productivity by providing time-oriented reporting into web or desktop

Software innovation is top of agenda in Australia today, with a host of new businesses emerging to service a blossoming market – Holly Morgan reports.

B U I L D I N G A N

Australian ISV

software usage.The software has been developed

in partnership with Microsoft and utilises Microsoft Power BI for analytics and reporting.

“Insightcentr is a proprietary software designed to run on PCs to understand the level of usage of any software that is running on the computer,” Stevens explained.

“The software understands what the user is using versus running.”

Leveraging the Microsoft Azure platform, Insightcentr works through the use of a lightweight agent that runs on Windows, creating the modern day equivalent of a digital time-and-motion study.

Consequently, Stevens said data can be accessed and aggregated on an anonymous basis to ensure privacy is maintained.

“Insightcentr negates the typical situation of half a dozen tabs open in a browser – such as Microsoft Word or Excel – that are running, but largely just sitting dormant in the background,” he added.

“It provides an understanding of what the user is actually looking at or what is in focus.

“We use that information, we capture it on an aggregate basis and we can then get a picture into the profile of use of particular software across the organisation.”

Stevens said businesses are deploying Insightcentr internally to build a clearer profile of workforce


DEVICEDESK/ISV 11

Labelled as “the second cab off the rank” by Stevens, the introduction of Insightcentr follows Devicedesk’s first foray into the Australian software market, through CatalogIQ.

Enabling organisations to order devices, software and services, the offering integrates with Autotask, ConnectWise, ServiceNow and Zendesk.

“We designed CatalogIQ for most of last year and upon going to market, the product took off immediately,” he said.

Built as a result of years of senior IT leadership experience for both Stevens and CTO, Greg Rudakov, the overriding concept of Devicedesk is capturing the imagination of businesses at a national and international level.

In New Zealand, managed services provider, Base 2, selected Devicedesk to help drive the company’s B2B eCommerce strategy, bringing the Australian start-up across the Tasman in the process.

“We are proud of the innovation that continues to come out of Australia, but we also have our sights set on expanding our capabilities overseas,” Stevens added.

“The business environment is right for us as organisations have an increasing appetite to try out new ways of working.”

Leveraging the channelAs the company continues to build out new solutions locally, Stevens outlined its dependence on the channel to help drive greater levels of productivity across organisations.

usage, uncovering what and how staff utilise software.

“Businesses can then launch a change initiative as a result,” he said. “It also helps organisations think about the adoption of software.”

Developed via a Microsoft BizSpark partnership - designed to facilitate start-up growth - Insightcentr provides usage analytics for multiple software platforms including DocuSign, Microsoft Dynamics, Office 365, Salesforce and SAP.

Data is then available for structured or ad-hoc reporting through

Microsoft Power BI alongside any other corporate data.

“We worked closely with Microsoft’s PowerBI product teams to build out Insightcentr,” Stevens added.

“It’s very unique and we don’t think there is anything in the market that currently competes directly.

“While the industry already has providers who can document what’s been installed on PCs or desktops across an organisation, Insightcentr provides businesses a clearer picture of what has actually been used and adopted.”

Photos by Maria Stefina


management consulting providers in Australia, as the company seeks further expansion through its channel.

“We’re very focused on listening to the channel and our customers in relation to what we are doing,” he added. “It helps us grow as a company and also ensures our products fit the market.

Spanning both product offerings, Stevens is launching a two-pronged approach to the channel, built around selling and using Devicedesk solutions to improve business productivity.

“With CatalogIQ, we see opportunities for both the channel in terms of taking our solution to market, but also in adopting the solution internally to help sell more effectively to customers” he added.

“Insightcentr also represents a unique opportunity for resellers to

simplify end-user computing.”Through an emerging business, and

an emerging channel, Devicedesk is operating at the cutting-edge of the local software market, representing a new breed of technology company, a company that identifies a business problem and builds a ready-made solution in response.

“We’re not a consumer technology company, we’re not a Fintech company and we’re not only focused on productivity enabling software,” Stevens added.

“We have lots of ideas across all ends of the spectrum and are executing on those plans today.”

Driven by an unrelenting entrepreneurial spirit, Stevens’ ambition is simple – to ensure Devicedesk is the enterprise shopfront for IT.

“But you still need the confidence and appetite for risk to put your brand and proposition out into the market in the first place,” he cautioned.

Specifically, Devicedesk is aligning closely with system integrators, MSPs and technology consultants to realise the emerging opportunities of an expanding market.

“We have a specific strategy around the channel,” he explained. “Firstly, we are looking for partners offering software asset management type services, alongside end-user assistance around getting the most out of licensing spend.

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Going to market through the Devicedesk Reseller Program, Stevens said the company is “actively engaging”

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14 ISV/ INTERGY CONSULTING

Intellectual property (IP) ownership isn’t everything.

In an industry where IP is imbued with ever greater levels of value, it’s no surprise that some software vendors try to create new solutions or platforms that they can sell over and over again for recurring revenue.

In this environment, designing unique software solutions for customers on a case-by-case basis and then handing over the IP rights may appear like lots of effort for such a short-term reward.

For Intergy Consulting however, it’s precisely this approach that has resulted in a loyal following bolstered by solid, long-term growth.

For more than a decade, the Sydney-based company has made a name for itself in the local market through providing customised software solutions for organisations of all shapes and sizes, often to help improve operational efficiency and customer engagement capabilities.

As an independent software vendor, Intergy draws upon open source platforms, such as Symphony, Magenta, MySQL, and Drupal, as well as Microsoft development platforms which include .NET, ASP.NET and SQL Server.

Through these resources, and others like them, the company creates web-based and on-premise software

solutions that cover components as diverse as customer relationship management platforms, spanning scheduling, job management, invoicing and payments, accounting integration and dashboard reporting, among others.

But crucially, every single solution is tailored to meet the individual needs of the end-user.

“We don’t have any software products per se, so we build all of our software made to order,” Crotty said.

“The benefits of that include that the software the [clients] get is exactly

what they need, nothing more, nothing less. That simplifies the software and makes it easier to use.

“This approach also means that we only charge for the software one time, so there are no ongoing fees associated with that. This, in the long run, could mean economic benefits to our clients as well.”

What this approach means is that the customer ends up owning the IP and the software that they pay Intergy to develop and build.

Promoting innovationAccording to Crotty – in founding Intergy in 2004 – customers can thereby innovate, move businesses forward and step “over and above” the competition.

When it comes to software development, ongoing value can be found in individuality – Intergy Consulting managing

director, David Crotty, explains why to Leon Spencer.

Made to order

“We’re not in the business of running other businesses. Our business is in software

development. That’s what we do”

“Our methodology doesn’t appeal to everyone,” he acknowledged. “There are some companies that would prefer to simply take something off the shelf and run with it, because of ease-of-use and so on.

“But we do believe that there is a market for the services that we offer, which allows companies to transform their business in the most effective way.

“It also means that the client takes full ownership of the IP and benefits 100 per cent from the idea. So if that idea really takes off, that client is

successful.“We’re not in

the business of running other businesses. Our business is in software

development. That’s what we do. And, frankly, we think that if a client has a great idea and it takes off, they should be the ones that benefit from their IP.”

While Intergy’s business model means that the company never sees potential future profit flow in from the IP of the solutions it develops for customers, this doesn’t mean that it misses out on future business associated with those solutions.

“Now, we benefit indirectly, because the more successful our clients are, the more work we get out of it in the long run,” Crotty explained.

“We seek to establish long-term relationships with our clients, the more successful they are, the more


16 ISV/ INTERGY CONSULTING

Between his own experience and the professional histories of his senior team, Crotty believes the company is well stocked with knowledge from a multitude of market sectors.

This broad knowledge-base, in combination with close collaboration with its customers, is one of the driving forces gives Intergy the ability to find unique solutions for specific business problems.

“We’ve been involved in the Australian small business marketplace for a long period of time,” he added.

“A lot of our staff members have moved through small businesses. So we’ve got a lot of deep experience in particular industries now.

“We don’t do things immediately as directed. We’re not pure developers; we also have business analysts, solution architects and industry experts that we

can bring into the mix to come up with the optimum solution, in close collaboration with the client.”

The road to growthIntergy’s consultative approach has seen the company undertake work for very large organisations, both in the private sphere and the public sector, including Origin Energy, Hilton Hotels, and Sony EMI, as well as numerous smaller and medium-sized organisations.

In addition to the consulting expertise the company retains among its Australian-based contingent, it also leverages software development expertise from a team of more than 50 people in India – all of them Intergy employees.

In fact, Intergy’s Indian operation has helped to see the company’s entire employee footprint balloon from just two people in Australian in 2004 to at least 52 across both countries in 2016.

Crotty said this structure is what allows Intergy the ability to leverage a growing team of talented developers

overseas, while maintaining Australian quality standards for local clients.

It also means the company can continue to focus on creating personalised, custom-made software for its customers while surrendering the IP rights to its solutions.

For Crotty, there are some very good reasons to continue doing things this way, not least because it keeps him and his team on the front foot when it comes to new technology and innovation.

“One of our core values is transparency and creativity, which we get to use, and innovation,” he said. “I enjoy the freedom and the flexibility of being unconstrained by what an existing product does. It also keeps things interesting.

“We think that building custom software, and building it in the most efficient way based on years of experience and [software] libraries that we have, and only charging once, is the right thing to do.

“I personally really dislike seeing inefficiencies within an organisation and we’re primarily about delivering the right solution to the right problem to avoid wasted resources. That’s driven a lot of what we’ve done so far and the way that we have grown.”

successful we are, as the product enhances over time and evolves.”

In operating for more than 12 years, some customers have been with Intergy since the very beginning.

Consequently, long-term partnerships and repeat business have seen the company work on the second or third round of upgrades to a particular customised software solution for long-standing customers.

“We like to act as their long-term technology strategic partner and to upgrade them when it’s appropriate, when there’s a business case to upgrade them,” Crotty added.

The prospect of owning their own IP is a big selling point for many customers, according to Crotty, who said organisations see the investment they make in the software developed by Intergy as an asset that will continue to

provide and add value over time.Additionally, by hanging onto the IP,

Intergy’s customers can make use of the federal government’s research and development (R&D) investment tax offset incentives, as well as other grants aimed at driving innovation among Australian companies.

These incentives would be much harder to apply for with an off-the-shelf package, according to Crotty.

Unique solutions for unique problemsMost of the time, however, companies come to Intergy for the problem-solving potential that only an individually-tailored, one-off and unique solution can offer.

Crotty and his team make a point of approaching every business problem first and foremost from a consulting perspective, and then from a software solution standpoint.

This is no surprise, given Crotty’s own background as a consultant for global professional services firm, Accenture.

“We seek to establish long-term relationships with our clients”


18 ISV/ VERSENT

Building and developing new tools to help customers is not a new

phenomenon in the channel.In fact, service providers have

been innovating both internally and externally for years.

But in Australia, one IT consultancy firm is stepping out of the shadows and into the spotlight on a full-time basis, emphasising the power of the product in a cloud context.

Since opening its doors in January 2015 as an integrator, Versent has grown to 105 staff, servicing over 70 customers with close to $20 million in revenue.

In less than two years, the Melbourne-based company has struck partnerships with Adobe, Axway, CA Technologies, Elastic, Microsoft, NGINX, Ping Identity, Rad Hat, Sail Point, Sumo Logic and Splunk, honing in on highly regulated industries across the country.

Crucially however, Amazon Web Services (AWS) serves as the key cloud ingredient to Versent’s plans for further expansion at a national level.

Founded by cloud experts, Versent works with more than half of the top 200 ASX-listed companies, consulting to high profile customers in finance, telecommunications, media, public sector and utilities sectors.

Built on a business model of

simplicity and repeatability, the company operates through a fixed price and outcome approach, typically based on 16-week deployment time.

With automation forming an integral part of Versent’s make-up, the business recently launched its new flagship product, Stax, designed to help Australian organisations access the power of the cloud through AWS, providing simplified management of workloads.

Now spun into a separate business entity, the locally developed offering is configured to remove the guesswork out of cloud, providing full stack visibility, risk and compliance assessments.

“We knew that the products in the market currently weren’t doing the job,” Stax general manager, Dave Slutzkin, said. “It was either too narrowly focused, wasn’t well suited for an Australian working environment, too expensive or not very effective.

“Businesses were not getting value out of the tools they were using to manage AWS environments and it became clear that there was a big gap in the market.

Stax is very much operating in the start-up phase, having hit the market less than two months ago, with nine dedicated staff already on board, spanning developers,

The rise of cloud is forcing IT providers to make bold bets, innovating from within in the pursuit of growth – Chris Player identifies a leader in the pack.

THE POWERTHE PRODUCTOF


designers, sales, marketing and product management.

Spinning offSlutzkin said the decision to spin off the Stax business from Versent was inspired by its ability to flourish as a standalone entity, feeding off its new found freedom and laser-sharp focus.

“The two businesses have different characteristics,” he explained. “Fundamentally, there’s a different way to run a product focused or software business rather than a pure services or consulting business.

“It’s less about utilisation, less about the monthly contract expiring, new contracts starting and resource management.

“Product and software is more focused on the medium to long-term management of product vision and roadmaps. It’s also about how you resource a team adequately to make that work.”

Slutzkin believes the purpose of Stax is to develop a “powerful and engaging tool” that makes understanding and managing cloud easy, further increasing confidence for enterprises moving to the cloud and helping to improve maturity in AWS.

Currently however, the product remains in ongoing development with a build time before launch lasting over nine months.


VERSENT/ISV 19

“We could see the need in the market and that’s one of the ways that partners and ISVs are operating in complementary spaces,” Slutzkin said.

“As a partner, you’re working on the pain points of an organisation on a daily basis, understanding the tools required to solve these problems.”

Developed on Australian shores, Slutzkin said the Stax team of AWS experts co-designed and built the tool alongside customers, ensuring the features offer exactly what local enterprises require, best reflecting the needs of the organisation.

From the perspective of the end-user, Carsales.com.au director of engineering, Michael Ridgway, said that Stax has provided a “tangible view” into the whole picture of AWS, a picture they couldn’t paint with previous tools.

“Stax has helped us uncover and remediate a number of things that we wouldn’t have been able to find without the visibility Stax provides,” he said.

Mutually beneficialFrom a company standpoint, Slutzkin said the expansion from services to product represents a mutually beneficial venture for both Stax and Versent.

“From the services point of view it’s a huge value-add to be able to solve a problem on an ongoing basis,” he said.

“There’s a lot of capability that needs to be built and tools can be a huge part of that.”

For Slutzkin, strong waves of development innovation are taking over the Australian industry, aligning with advisory services to provide customers with a broader offering as a result.

“Consulting companies are building products but also pure

Dave Slutzkin


20 ISV/ VERSENT

consulting capability to make the best use of their products.”

Looking ahead, Slutzkin said Stax is continuing to explore different routes to market, aligning to Versent but also the AWS Marketplace.

“We work closely with Versent and AWS which is beneficial because we can help both customer sets,” he added.

Despite being less than three months old, Stax is currently fielding enquiries from interested overseas parties, emphasising the worldwide potential of aligning with a global cloud powerhouse such as AWS.

“We’re still targeting Australia but we’re making steps to expand more broadly into the AWS marketplace, both in Australia and overseas,” Slutzkin added.

product companies, especially within the enterprise space, are falling away because the consulting option is crucial,” he observed.

“Partners must be able to provide something more in-depth than just what a product can do automatically.

“We’re seeing that progress on an ongoing basis. We might identify an opportunity within Stax to help a customer save money or fix issues within the cloud, which leads onto a new type of conversation.”

Through Stax’s close partnership with its parent company, Slutzkin said there’s an “obvious answer” to such questions.

“It works well and I think this approach will continue,” he acknowledged. “Product companies need to have that

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22 INTERVIEW/AWS

Check the street posters and the billboards – a new act is in town.

Billed as the headline performer, for centuries theatres around the world have fought to house the best talent on the planet, providing a platform to amaze wave after wave of customers from Sydney to Stockholm.

Today, the rise of the independent software vendor (ISV) is creating a technological equivalent.

Also billed as a headline performer, leading vendors are competing at breakneck pace to attract top ISV talent, providing a cloud platform capable of fostering innovation on a global scale.

In providing such a framework, ISVs are becoming channel superstars, with vendors clamouring to create cloud-friendly environments to ensure ongoing profitability and growth.

“ISVs are important because they consume our platform, but more importantly they provide innovative solutions to our end customers,” Amazon Web Services head of channels and alliances, Stefan Jansen, said.

In keeping with sustained public cloud services market growth of 16.5 per cent – reaching $US204 billion in 2016 – AWS is taking advantage of a rise in cloud application services (SaaS), which are forecast to grow 20.3 per cent this year, reaching $US37.7 billion according to Gartner.

As chief advocates of independent software vendors, Amazon Web Services head of channels and alliances, Stefan Jansen, outlines to James Henderson how the vendor is providing a platform for cloud innovation.


Providing a platform for

ISV INNOVATION


AWS/INTERVIEW 23

software and technical services.In short, the store serves to

accommodate and foster the growth of AWS services from third-party providers that have built solutions on top of the AWS platform.

“We’re growing significantly with over 2,500 listings covering over 900 ISVs,” Jansen said. “It predominantly started out in the tooling space, including backup and data recovery but now more SaaS products are being listed.”

Based on end-user feedback – in keeping with the customer-centricity mantra that dictates every move AWS makes – Jansen said the marketplace “removes the friction” of procuring and consulting software, addressing two ongoing challenges within the cloud.

“Customers enjoy the benefits of cloud but don’t like to be locked into long-term contracts,” he added. “We’re removing those pain points and working with software vendors to allow them to offer their software on a consumption basis - whether

that’s hourly, monthly rates etc.“As a consulting partner,

system integrator or managed service provider, benefits can be found by instantly helping customers consume that software. And if you’re a reseller you can also start reselling and receive your standard reselling benefits in that context.”

Through the cloud, and its growing online store of services, Jansen said there’s opportunities for “all types of partners” within

“It’s clear that SaaS consumption will overtake traditional software with the consumption of applications and SaaS-based products continuing to rise,” Jansen added.

In the wake of such seismic SaaS activity, and with a partner network comprising on consultancy and technology partners, AWS is betting on its ISV channel to keep itself at the leading edge of the industry.

Working closely with born-in-the-cloud ISVs, Jansen said the expanding footprint of the AWS cloud – spanning 38 availability zones within 14 geographic regions – is helping partners realise both local and global ambitions.

“Born-in-the-cloud ISVs are instantly global,” Jansen said.

Australian innovationCloser to home however, Australia represents a growing hotbed of companies rising through the AWS cloud ranks to capture new customers, both large and small.

“Take Versent as an example,” Jansen explained. “Rather than building a traditional software business, you can just spin it up through the cloud and away you go.

“It’s an emerging trend as more companies begin to follow suit.”

As one of the country’s fastest growing AWS consulting partners, the Melbourne-based company opened its doors in January 2015, before growing to 105 staff, servicing over 70 customers with close to $20 million in revenue.

“They saw an opportunity based on the conversations they had with enterprise customers and realised a need for consulting services driving automation, security and agile,” Jansen added. “As they’ve developed they are

now delivering to multiple enterprise customers not only in Australia, but also Singapore.

“Versent architects then built and launched a product called Stax, which is now attracting interest from the US market. If you’re a software developer or consulting partner with repetitive IP, there’s no requirement to buy the assets.

“Instead companies can experiment and fail fast at a lower cost, building out a product that can then be taken to market.”

Amidst the rising prominence of ISVs such as Versent – and its spin off business in Stax – Jansen said AWS assesses its channel community through the lens of its AWS Partner Network (APN), allowing partners to showcase potential on the platform.

“APN allows partners to register with minimal criteria,” he added. “But as partners demonstrate their capabilities and skill sets they can advance up the tiers. We want to assure that our customers understand what the partner program means and

that it represents a level of quality and quality assurance.”

Working with the channelFrom a reseller perspective, those operating within the program can resell ISV products that are onboarded onto the AWS Marketplace.

Launched in 2012, the AWS Marketplace is an online store allowing cloud customers to find, compare and utilise AWS

“Rather than building a traditional software business, you can just spin it up

through the cloud and away you go”


24 INTERVIEW/AWS

bright lights of the cloud – and the countless innovations happening within it – the AWS route to market poses problems.

With 2016 yet to close, AWS has already added over 700 new features to its cloud platform, with the number widely expected to increase in the twelve months ahead.

“The pace of innovation is only accelerating,” Jansen acknowledged. “For partners new to cloud and looking to transform their own business, instead look at ways to drive instant value to your business.”

In examining the Australian landscape of partners, as the “broad and diverse” channel jockeys for position within the cloud, Jansen’s advice is clear - “play to your strengths”.

“Take Myriad IT as an example,” explained Jansen, referring to the company’s expertise around JD Edwards enterprise resource planning software implementation. “They’ve historically been very strong in the deployment of JD Edwards solutions.

“Now they have built out AWS capabilities and are migrating JD Edwards customers to the cloud, providing greater agility while reducing the costs of legacy infrastructure.

“For them it’s a logical extension and for most partners, they are building out cloud capabilities that stay true to their roots.”

Looking ahead, Jansen said AWS is going to further emphasise its investments within the local market, delivered through two core channel initiatives.

“Firstly, we’re increasing our collaborative models with ISVs,” he added. “We’re going to place more emphasis on helping the channel consume ISVs that have listings on our marketplace, it’s a key route to market for us.

“Secondly, we’re targeting customers that operate within the mid-market and SMB spaces. There’s growing demand around adopting cloud services and we need partners who can help migrate those businesses and scale within that channel.”

the AWS ecosystem, advising partners to “think customer first” in the pursuit of revenue growth.

“Listen to their needs and your plan should depend on what the customer is asking for,” he advised. “We work with partners of all breeds and capabilities and continue to engage across all areas of the channel.”

As the buyer become more knowledgeable and sophisticated, Jansen said customers are now demanding in-depth capabilities from the channel, seeking specialisation and collaboration in equal measure.

“Specialisation is happening within large consulting partners such as Accenture,” he said. “They’ve built deep capabilities within the digital space around big data and analytics and customers want to consume those services.

“Partners must also display a certain level of depth when helping organisations move to the cloud and collaboration forms a key part of that equation.”

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26 ISV/ XERO

A kin to changing the engine on a jet while

it’s still flying, Xero’s migration to Amazon

Web Services (AWS) represents an epic

undertaking in the world of cloud.

Featuring the transition of over 700,000 customers,

the desire for greater agility and innovation has seen

the cloud accounting company align with a platform

capable of quenching such thirst.

With offices popping up in the Americas, Asia and

Europe – alongside Australia and New Zealand – the

independent software vendor (ISV) is illuminating

the skies with a new brand of software-as-a-service

accounting applications.

After setting the expansion wheels in motion

through Rackspace infrastructure, the move to

AWS allows Xero to economically scale as it bids to

surpass a million customers worldwide.

“When you’re in the business of technological

innovation, fast-paced future-thinking comes with

the territory,” Xero general manager of platform

architecture and delivery, Mark Rees, said.

“As we move over to the AWS platform, and

welcome its boundless computing power, we can

experiment and iterate on our core product at pace.”

Rees said Xero can now leverage the

increased investment AWS has made in platform

In support of global expansion plans, Xero general manager of platform architecture and delivery, Mark Rees, explains to James Henderson why vendor alignment is crucial in the cloud.

Xero: Aligning with AWS

services to build and deploy software with shorter

delivery timeframes.

“By using the on-demand computing power of

AWS, we can release new software more rapidly, and

experiment with these features in ways that were not

possible on our older platform,” he explained.

“Our focus on completing one of the largest

data migrations to the AWS platform sets Xero up

to deliver fast-paced innovation, leverage machine

learning technology, improve margins, increase

uptime and security and drive better business

outcomes to help small businesses flourish.”

ScalabilityBuilt across AWS data centres in the US, Rees said

the migration is designed to allow for customer

growth, increased application innovation and a

reduction in downtime.

“It’s not enough for Xero to be available within

our service level objectives,” he added. “It’s important

for us to know that our applications can scale to

meet customer demand, even on the busiest days

of the month.”

Unsurprisingly for a cloud accounting company, Xero

systems are busiest on the 1st and 20th of every month,

as well as the days leading up to tax filing deadlines.

“The elasticity available within AWS allows us to

scale out our servers to meet those times of high

user demand, delivering greater consistency to our

customers, even during the busiest times of the day,”

Rees added.

“But the most important innovations don’t just

speed up our business opportunities – they protect

them too.”

As explained by Rees, Xero has implemented

a number of new systems on AWS that allow

customers to better protect accounts, such as two-

step Authentication (2SA) or User Login History.

“Our systems on AWS will now actively identify

strange login behaviours, and notify the customer

directly,” he added.

XERO applications on aws

XERO/ISV 27

“High growth environments have changed the

way security needs to be delivered - we need to be

able to protect and defend our environment while

we move at a blistering pace.

“To protect the financial data of millions of

users, we’ve taken the best of enterprise security

platforms and merged it with the next generation of

platform technology, like AWS, to build our overall

security strategy.”

CloudDuring the past 12 months, Xero has shipped more

than 1,400 product updates and features, becoming

one of the first accounting platforms to go all-in on

the cloud.

“We’ve maintained our innovative edge ever

since,” Rees said.

“The move to the AWS platform enables us to

continue to deliver game-changing products and

features which drive better business outcomes,

improve access to capital and boost productivity.

“We’re beginning to see the power of AWS’s

investment in services, that allow the increased

adoption of new technologies inside Xero with

shorter lead times.”

For Rees, it’s an opportunity which has

required years of “heavy lifting”, coupled

with “hundreds of millions of dollars worth

of investment”, to reach this stage of the

company’s transformation.

“We’re not a traditional software licence

company,” he said. “We’re using software to

rewire the economy and it’s this global framework

that’s enabled us to transform how small

businesses work.”

As the migration process comes to a close, Rees

said Xero is aligning closely with AWS to leverage the

power of the cloud platform in the years ahead.

“With the ability to plug-and-play complex big

data analytics and machine learning tools, the

partnership helps provide greater insights and tools

that we can build to empower accountants and

bookkeepers around the world,” he added.

“We’re beginning to see the power of AWS’s investment

in services”

| JULY 2016 | arnnet.com.au

28 ISV/SIXPIVOT

Finding the ISV sweet spot

F or many independent

software vendors (ISVs),

cloud remains an enigma - a

mysterious area of the market that

remains untested and untapped.

Yet within two years, more than 30

per cent of the 100 largest vendors in

the world will introduce new software

products that complete the transition

from cloud-first to cloud-only,

representing a sizeable industry shift.

Consequently, Australian ISVs

must move with the times.

“ISVs are looking to take

advantage of cloud,” SixPivot CEO,

Faith Rees, said.

As a cloud first innovator, SixPivot

is a software development and

strategic management company that

works with ISVs across the country,

helping partners turn product visions

into successful business operations.

“ISVs are our key target market

for the services side of the business,”

Rees explained. “We work with ISVs

who have had a core business and

are now looking at what can take

them forward in the future.

“Our sweet spot is helping ISVs

who’ve been in the market for a

while with an on-premise product,

who now need to scale and globalise

– which generally means a move to

the cloud.”

Underpinned by six core areas –

imagine, strategy, investment, build,

market and technical excellence –

the Brisbane-based company helps

ISVs draw up strategic and future

roadmaps through the cloud.

Yet in drawing on a wealth of

Australian IT industry experience,

the SixPivot team remain well placed

to identify the common reasons

why ISVs encounter challenges, and

subsequently fail.

“We see five key challenges for ISVs

today,” SixPivot CTO, Braden Voigt,

explained. “They are based around

start-up mentalities, not having the

right people and culture in place,

alongside issues around leadership

an evolving market and Cloud Ctrl has

an extensive roadmap which makes

our SaaS offering much more than a

dashboard and intelligent, multi-

tenant cloud billing system,” he added.

Backed by Burnham Private

Equity, SixPivot is supported

by Microsoft and IBM through

acceptance into the Microsoft

BizSpark Plus program, Microsoft

Ventures Global Initiative via the

Microsoft innovation Centre and the

IBM Global Entrepreneur Program.

Looking forward, the company

plans to ramp up its investment in

product development through its

expanding team of technical and

industry experts.

“Our business model hasn’t

changed, it’s just escalated,” Rees

added. “As we continue to build out

our product capabilities, we will

either sell them or create individual

standalone companies.

“From an ISV perspective we

want to continue to find gaps in the

market through collaborating and

building unique IP as a result.”

BRADEN VOIGT (SixPivot) and FAITH REES (SixPivot)

and business transformation.”

In providing software

development for partners, SixPivot

works with a number of select ISVs

each year to help them rebuild or

start new product developments.

Since officially launching in July

2015, the company has increased

its staff count to 17, working closely

with leading cloud vendors such as

Microsoft and IBM.

“The key for ISVs is around

collaboration and understanding

that nobody knows everything,” Rees

added. “There’s a lot of hype but we’re

not about reinventing the wheel,

rather seeing how we can add value.”

Alongside deepening ties with

ISVs at a national level, SixPivot is

also building out its own solutions,

through Cloud Ctrl - which was

launched in December 2015.

As explained by Voigt, Cloud Ctrl

enables organisations to monitor,

manage and analyse cloud hosted

services across a range of providers

in one location.

“Cloud provider management is

James Henderson uncovers an emerging business playing a pivotal role in enabling channel success.


30 PARTNER ROUND-UP

Reaching for the cloud in the

Sunshine StateResellers up and down the Queensland coastline are grappling with cloud offerings – Leon Spencer.

Lee GoodmanOWNER – COMPUTER TROUBLESHOOTERS –

NOOSA

Computer Troubleshooters Noosa

operates on Queensland’s Sunshine

Coast. Being a regional support

company, our client mix tends

toward the small business and

home business market. We also

have a fair number of tourism-

focused customers.

One of the biggest problems that

our customers continue to face is

broadband speeds. Certain areas

From beyond Wednesday Island in the Torres Strait, to Coolangatta sitting atop the state border, the Queensland coastline ranges for over 6,000 kilometres and plays host to innumerable towns of all shapes and sizes, along with the IT

providers that serve them.The coastal region of Australia’s

Sunshine State not only provides technology resellers a sun-drenched paradise in which to ply their trades, it also presents some challenges.

The rise of cloud services, for example, is hampered somewhat by lingering connectivity issues and hardware sometimes bears the scars of corrosion caused by the coastline’s balmy, salt-laden air.

Nick RocheNATIONAL DIRECTOR –

COMPUTER TROUBLESHOOTERS

Computer Troubleshooters has

a number of regionally located

franchise locations, including

Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast,

among other locations.

Each business is an independent

organisation focused on the local

community as member of Australia’s

largest IT franchise support network.

The regional businesses tend

to have a broader reach across the

community with a skew to smaller

businesses and home offices.

In the business world, we tend

to focus on Office 365 as a core

solution for organisations, and build

the secondary technical and support

requirements from there.

Our key constraints in regional

areas are broadband speeds and

reliability, delivery times and costs

for urgent replacement, along with

a traditionally skeptical regional

audience on all things that are new.

Efforts to move businesses away

from on-premises infrastructure

to cloud and hybrid solutions can

be difficult to achieve without

breakthrough changes in technology,

such as the National Broadband

Network (NBN).

Regional businesses are

certainly more community orientated

and relationship-focused than in the

city but, that said, clients are often

more relaxed and understanding

with technological challenges,

as they feel they are constantly

confronted with them.


PARTNER ROUND-UP 31

Stephen JonesOWNER

COMPUTER TROUBLESHOOTERS – MUDGEERABA

I have an office workshop in Mudgeeraba,

Queensland. The business is part of the Computer

Troubleshooters IT franchise, which allows me to

provide local IT support, but with a global support

network in place.

As a local business on the Gold Coast we

offer prompt, professional expert support when

customers need it. I provide mobile onsite, remote,

and managed services, and a complete range of IT

services, including computer repairs, networking,

and cloud-based solutions.

As a regional business, my clients tend to be

small businesses, home offices, and home users.

On the business side, we focus heavily on Office

365 as a solution to provide small businesses

with enterprise grade email, and cloud based file

storage.

Where we differ from metropolitan IT businesses

is probably in the infrastructure we have to work

with and how we can make that work. The NBN

would be major transformation for the community

when it arrives.

Some of the challenges we face in the area in

which we operate tend to be around the customers’

network speeds and how they affect cloud based-

technologies. This is particularly notable when it

comes to uploading files. This factor can sometimes

make it tough to ‘sell’ the customer on new

technologies and how they can improve their way of

business.

Picking up new clients is a challenge in any

business, but once on-boarded, they are happy with

our service and commitment to them.

have a lack of ADSL2 ports, and

others are so far from an exchange

that the achievable speeds are not

suitable for services such as cloud-

based accounting, online backup,

and remote support services.

Being away from the city can be

a drawback for product delivery from

our suppliers. While some are able to

offer next-day delivery, others can take

three business days or longer. We also

tend to miss out on personal contact

with the account managers and

vendors, due to the distances involved.

On the positive side of being in

a regional area, there is a sense of

community with most of our clients.

We try to keep things local and support

each other as much as possible.

One of our main focuses this

year is the rollout of Office 365 to

more of our customers. This is one

instance where being a smaller

company doesn’t mean that we have

to accept a lower standard of service.

We are also continuing to

educate our clients on the benefit

of preventative maintenance and

remote management services.

Craig RandallSMALL BUSINESS IT SPECIALIST –

MOOLOOLABA COMPUTERS

Mooloolaba Computers is a locally-

owned and operated one-stop-shop

for Sunshine Coast businesses,

providing a single point of contact for

many businesses on the Sunshine

Coast, from the small home office

to multiple-location, medium-

sized businesses.

The single point of contact is a

process where we can take care of

just about everything for the client.

They call us once and we then find

the solution for them.

Whether it is internet or phones,

email, and web hosting, hardware,

or third party software-related,

financed, and managed agreements,

we do it all under one roof.

We enable our clients to place

trust in us, which helps to provide

resolution and results quicker and

more efficiently.

We struggle with internet-

connectivity because ADSL is

poor in many parts of the Sunshine

Coast. The Coast now has some

better wireless radio solutions,

and we’ve partnered up with local

internet service providers (ISPs)

and installers to be able to provide

flexible internet options.

Recently, the NBN has been

switched on as well, yet even with that

comes challenges. But we’re hoping

for the best, as this enables our cloud

services such as hosted desktop and

the server side of the business to

take off.

Hotels, tourism, restaurants, and

more make up the unique portion

of our everyday clients. However,

customers’ devices can struggle with

corrosion in many parts of the Coast,

being so close to the water.

Low-cost mini computers,

including Intel’s NUC [Next Unit of

Computing] can really come in handy

for quick swap-out and longevity in

these environments, even smoother

operation when we have a NAS

[network-attached storage] onsite.

As we have a wide range of

services, a shopfront, online store,

mobile services and business

services, most customers we get

come by referral.

Operating in scarcely populated

areas on the Sunshine Coast, we

do travel far and wide – primarily

between Caloundra and Noosa, and

into the hinterlands.

In comparison to a metro-based

IT provider, I would say that, other

than mobile service technicians, we

find quieter suburbs do not have the

workshop-based competition, and

customers are okay to cruise a suburb

or two to visit us in Mooloolaba.


32 INTERVIEW/HEMISPHERE TECHNOLOGIES

As the industry advocates for new ways of thinking within the channel, Holly Morgan

tests the theory in distribution.

A next-generation approach to

DISTRIBUTION



HEMISPHERE TECHNOLOGIES/INTERVIEW 33

intervention, intrusion, detection and behavioural analysis.

“The biggest issue our partners face is striking a balance between compliance and business continuity,” he explained.

“Compliance is becoming a bigger issue every year, to the point where it’s becoming a mandatory issue. It’s no longer good enough to just deploy some endpoint protection.

“Businesses now require a layered approach, which is why we’ve started to move into other areas of technology.

“Having that approach, ensures our partners and customers are secure and compliant without reducing productivity.”

For Mamonitis, compliance requirements

are constantly changing, with businesses now seeking security experts in the field.

“This suits our model as a distributor,” he said. “The security conversation is becoming easier in Australia as compliance continues to grow, because previously, it was a reluctant sale.

“But today CTOs can go to fellow C-level executives and have that security discussion, and quantify what a return on investment will look like.

“It’s now more of a business sale because there’s been many cases recently of high-profile data breaches which can be devastating to an organisation. It’s not uncommon that a business closes its doors as a result of a breach.”

Managed securityFrom a monetary perspective, managed services and software-as-a-service plays are expanding fast within the security space, creating new routes to market as a result.

But perhaps it’s unsurprising that managed security services are all the rage in the channel today, as margins on security products diminish and customers have less time to focus on

With the number of daily security threats increasing by the second – creating statistics longer than

smartphone numbers – the temptation to switch off is appealing.

It’s just one more cautionary tale amidst a sea of warnings.

Yet for the channel, the overwhelming and exponential rise of attacks targeting businesses represents new ways to extract value from a lucrative market.

Likewise, in distribution, where the pace of change is unrelenting and the consequence of inaction fatal.

“We’re moving away from our old line of thinking around security,” Hemisphere

Technologies managing director, Andrew Mamonitis, said.

With IT outsourcing, security testing and data loss prevention offering the biggest growth opportunities, worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach $US81.6 billion in 2016, an increase of 7.9 per cent over 2015.

Latest findings from research analyst firm, Gartner, report that consulting and IT outsourcing are currently the largest categories of spending on information security.

Until the end of 2020, the highest growth is expected to come from security testing, IT outsourcing and data loss prevention (DLP).

“Our channel partners are hungry for next-generation technology, and we’ve been very active in introducing new offerings to the market,” Mamonitis added.

Speaking nine months after taking the reins at the specialist distributor - having vacated his role as Kaspersky Lab managing director of Australia and New Zealand - Mamonitis said Hemisphere is honing its skills around next-generation security products such as

“We hang our hat on being a specialist distributor”

NewHEMISPHERE TECHNOLOGY VENDORS IN 2016• Altaro

• BackBox

• Centrify

• F-Secure

• Menlo Security

• Pulse Secure

• Trustwave


34 INTERVIEW/HEMISPHERE TECHNOLOGIES

levels of additional value.Yet despite the clamour for MSSP

models, the new approach to market creates new questions around the role of distribution within the channel.

“Some vendors struggle to understand how a distributor fits into that model,” Mamonitis acknowledged.

“We on boarded AlienVault about 18 months ago and enjoyed solid growth during the first year. Then in consultation with our team we created a managed service provider addition to the offering which has seen exponential growth over the past six months.

“But initially AlienVault attempted to go direct with the MSSP model without distribution and struggled to gain traction, which created our partnership in the market.

“The customer is still looking for

that trusted partner who can support them through the bigger opportunities in the market today.”

Value-addIn distribution, the notion of “value-add” continues to be the most overused and clichéd word within the channel, aligning itself to unworthy causes.

From a Hemisphere perspective however, and in provisioning enterprise-grade layered security solutions, channel support arrives through a different approach.

“We hang our hat on being a specialist distributor,” Mamonitis said. “We’ve also identified key gaps to plus in our portfolio while ensuring that we don’t spread ourselves too thinly.”

In operating through a “hands-on” reseller model, Mamonitis said Hemisphere “cherry picks” its vendors to align with the company’s overriding

go-to-market strategy.

Since the turn of the year, the distributor has

struck deals with F-Secure, Centrify, Trustwave, Pulse Secure, BackBox, Altaro and Menlo Security, with many more in the pipeline.

“We’re very selective about the vendors we bring onboard and are not concerned by name, logo or size,” he added. “We’re interested in the relevance a vendor has with the customer and the reseller and we must ensure they are filling a need.

“This enables us to provide higher levels of customer service and technical knowledge to go above and beyond that of a larger distributor.”

The end game for Mamonitis and the Hemisphere team is to deepen the levels of reseller engagement through providing complete security solutions, solutions capable of addressing emerging threats and attacks.

keeping the house safe.“The channel realises that

the market is becoming very competitive and it’s becoming tougher to sell on-premise type solutions, meaning partners need new ways to ensure business sustainability and profitability,” Mamonitis added.

Consequently, managed security service providers (MSSP) are emerging in droves across Australia, providing outsourced monitoring and management of security devices and systems.

Aligned with the Hemisphere portfolio, common services include managed firewall, intrusion detection, virtual private network, vulnerability scanning and anti-viral services.

MSSPs are using high-availability security operation centres to provide 24/7 services designed to reduce the number of operational security personnel an enterprise needs to hire, train and retain to maintain an acceptable security posture.

“We turn managed service providers into managed security service providers,” Mamonitis said.

“Resellers are seeing huge upside in terms of the revenue that can be generated through this approach.

“But many resellers and distributors struggle to see how they fit into the jigsaw between transitioning from on-premise and selling boxes towards MSP and MSSP models.”

Looking ahead, and in line with industry movement, security spending will become increasingly service-driven as organisations continue to face staffing and talent shortages.

Mamonitis said managed services allows security-focused resellers to create tighter end-user relationships, alongside monthly annuities and new

“We’re moving away from our old line of thinking around security”


Dominic Whitehand Photos by Maria Stefina

This might sound weird,” Exclusive Networks managing director, Dominic

Whitehand, said.“But I believe that my biggest

strength is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).”

In acknowledging those three little words, Whitehand subscribes to the notion that every weakness has a corresponding strength.

“I use my OCD to fine-tune the detail in everything that I do, so that it is as exact as I believe it can be,” he explained.

“This fuels strong communication skills and the ability to interact with

“

Turning weakness into strengthFresh from being inducted into the ARN Hall of Fame, Exclusive Networks managing director, Dominic Whitehand, explains to James Henderson why hidden in an apparent weakness, is always a strength.

36 HALL OF FAME/DOMINIC WHITEHAND


DOMINIC WHITEHAND/HALL OF FAME 37

people in a specific way, as well as a strong belief system and a considered vision for what people want and how to address that want.

“Although OCD is usually considered as somewhat of an affliction or negative disorder, I believe it can be reversed and used extremely positively.”

In extracting the positive from OCD – displaying discipline rather than disorder – Whitehand epitomises how turning a perceived weakness into a prevailing strength acts as a key separator from success and failure.

Billed as the hallmark of leadership, such self-awareness helped Whitehand build a local distribution business which caught the eye of a global giant, following an initial $4,500 investment.

It’s a story Whitehand takes pride in telling – how himself, Sharon Whitehand and Jonathan Odria each laid down $1,500 on the table to start WhiteGold Solutions in November 2002.

Over a decade later and Exclusive Group came calling, acquiring the business in August 2014.

“My greatest achievement is to work with and succeed with my wife and my best mate,” Whitehand said. “We’ve had no major conflicts or differences of opinion in fourteen years.

“This business is the sum of all three parts – any one or two without the other/s simply wouldn’t have worked in the same way, as we all bring dramatically different skills to the table.

“But I believe our greatest collective achievement has been to provide young Australians with an example that you can achieve what you want, in the face of incredibly strong international competition, if you put your time, heart and soul into it in this industry.”

For technology has always been deeply engrained into Whitehand’s

psyche, once again reflecting his ability to turn an obsession into an idea for future progression.

“I’ve always loved technology and in particular personal computers, game consoles and gadgets,” Whitehand said.

“Anyone who knows me will tell you that I always have the latest tech gadgets as soon as they are released – it’s a real weakness for me. But the upside is that I think it keeps me in touch with the technology industry as a whole.”

No regretsFollowing initial plans to enter the legal profession, Whitehand missed out on studying law at university in the UK, subsequently “falling into technology” as a result.

“I just missed out on the law course I wanted to join in Birmingham but they offered a new degree course on Industrial Information Technology, so I looked into it,” he recalled.

“I spoke to two barristers, a solicitor and two heads of IT at large organisations through various family and friend connections and they all said that IT was the most promising direction to go in.

“So I went for that degree and graduated in 1992. I’ve never regretted that decision.”

Likewise, Whitehand has no regrets about packing his bags and relocating to the other side of the world, emigrating to Australia on May 5, 1996.

“I knew that I would stay forever within about three days,” Whitehand admitted. “Australia truly feels not just

like my physical home, but also my spiritual home.

“In twenty years it has given me everything I have – and I constantly try to

pour my everything back into it.“I was always drawn to Australia

inexplicably from a young age. In fact my Mum apparently told my Dad she had a very strong feeling that I would emigrate when I was older, most likely to Australia – that was when I was about four years old.”

Over two decades on from first stepping onto Australian soil, Whitehand is leading Exclusive Networks into its next phase of growth, drawing on his ability to think global, but act local.

In steering the distribution ship, Whitehand believes his success has been down to observing a set of key leadership characteristics, leading from the front, but also by example.

“I believe a great leader is someone who can listen more than they talk,” he said. “Someone who leads by example and is prepared to stand side-by-side with their followers, no matter how hard it gets.

“Someone who takes calculated risks, but isolates those risks to themselves rather than their followers as much as possible.

“Finally, someone who can observe their allies, enemies and competition is as much detail as they can and act on their observations to position their organisation for success, in the most ethical way possible.”

“My greatest achievement is to work with and succeed with my wife and my best mate”


38 ROUNDTABLE/CLOUD

Creating cloud clarity in the channelIn the world of cloud, the next steps to partner progression remain unknown, creating a greater need for clarity in the channel - James Henderson reports.

While market literature is crammed with

rapid adoption facts and figures, the next step in cloud computing still requires definition.

As large end-user organisations take to the skies in a big way, the tipping point is upon the industry, with cloud adoption now past the perception of something that “only start-ups do.”

But in chasing the cloud silver lining, partners must create clarity for customers as the market becomes more sophisticated, creating specific strategies built around specific business requirements.

“It’s a case by case conversation,” Infront managing director, Allan King, said. “Lots of businesses have different adoption and maturity rates.

“But overwhelmingly I’m surprised by the lack of knowledge around cloud, even from the CIO through to the technologists and how best to move forward.

“On the whole I think most organisations are excited by cloud, but they just don’t know why they are excited.”

In Australia, it’s a sentiment shared across the channel, with partners preempting spikes in cloud growth across all aspects of the industry.

“We’re seeing certain areas of the market that are quite mature with explosive growth, but when you drill down into other parts

cloud is still just a concept,” Datacom national cloud manager, Alex Kennedy, added.

“Business still don’t really understand what they want or how to get there in cloud and that’s part of the navigation process for a partner.”

While enthusiasm remains strong – and continues to show signs of increasing – the appetite for migrating entire business workloads to the skies is waning, emphasising the prominence of adopting a hybrid strategy, tapping into the benefits of both on-premise and cloud technologies.

“Businesses initially went all in with cloud then realised that it doesn’t work for everything,” Blue Central account director, Richard Youssef, said.

“Now they are working out how to pull back and what’s going to be fit for purpose and where the true value is.”

Crucially for the channel

however, and in illustrating the network of opportunity emerging within a cloud context, the conversation is advancing between both partners and end-users around how best to extract value to drive business innovation.

“There’s not one flavour or one colour of cloud,” Avnet Technology Solutions chief technology officer, Chris Farrow, observed.

“Initially the conversations were around credit cards, the internet and an online account but it’s clearly going to be a lot more complicated than that. Over the next few years the market will continue to accelerate further.”

End-user expectations“Customers don’t care what colour it is, they want to know how they can innovate on a particular platform,” IBM cloud lead of Australia and New Zealand, John Kaleski, said.

“That’s the topic that’s lighting up customer conversations and whether that be at senior, mid or junior level, they all want to know what they can do with cloud.

“In truth, cloud may not save a business too much money, in fact there’s an argument that it could be more expensive, but crucially, businesses care about what they can do with it.

“How can they enable cloud? How can they innovate? That’s the next step for the industry to address in the years ahead.”

Echoing Kaleski’s comments, ASI Solutions managing director, Nathan Lowe, believes the

Chris Farrow (Avnet), Eduardo Silva (ARN) and

Richard Yousseff (Blue Central)


CLOUD/ROUNDTABLE 39

opportunity for partners is around tapping into such a thirst for innovation within the Australian enterprise.

“Customers want to innovate,” he added. “They want to have that chance and don’t want to worry about keeping the lights on or the low level stuff. We provide that service as the managed service provider.”

With innovation at the heart of the conversation, cloud discussions continue to evolve from the preliminary chatter of two or three years previous, highlighting a market that is slowly coming to grips with how best to interpret, and utilise, this emerging technology.

“The perception that cloud services just work and that businesses can plug into a software-as-a-service platform and the problems dissolve is changing,”

InfoTrust CEO, Dane Meah, said.“IT departments are no longer

about managing infrastructure anymore, they’re about delivering business outcomes. And that’s really what cloud enables you to do.”

For Meah, IT departments are now becoming the end-user of the platform, removing the worries around stability and reliability.

“That becomes the vendor’s

problem,” he explained.Of the early frontrunners in

the market – those besotted by cloud and keen to innovate immediately – the appetite for change essentially comes from a deeper understanding of the industry and what’s needed to be achieved to enable success.

“For the partners who have taken a while to get up to speed, now’s the time to work with customers to deliver business outcomes,” Lowe added. “That’s

the key message, address business outcomes as opposed to IT whether that be across public, private or hybrid.”

With the conversation now moving beyond the IT manager and into different lines of business, the onus is on partners to profile new cloud customers, engaging with the market in a deeper and more measured capacity.

“Three years ago I spent 12 months talking to customers to understand their challenges around cloud,” King added. “Business expectations are driving greater pressure on IT, but traditional systems aren’t able to respond.

“No enterprise is born in the cloud so naturally it’s defaulted into a two-speed IT model which supports legacy but also responds to the business.”

As the need to service both sides of the business heightens, cloud is moving away from its place as the industry’s most overused and cliched term, into another part of the technology equation.

“We’re seeing the dynamics of the market change,” VMware

“Customers don’t care what colour it is, they want to know how they can

innovate on a particular platform”

(L-R) Anthony Carilla (Avnet), Chris Farrow (Avnet), Aaron Steppat (VMware), Richard Yousseff (Blue Central), Nathan Lowe

(ASI Solutions), Dane Meah (InfoTrust), James Henderson (ARN), Alex Kennedy (Datacom), Hafizah Osman (ARN), Allan

King (Infront), Janet Docherty (Veritas), John Kaleski (IBM), Jamie Warner (eNerds)


40 ROUNDTABLE/CLOUD

senior product marketing manager, Aaron Steppat, added.

“Today, most businesses see cloud as just pure technology.

“To facilitate the rise in forecast to come within the infrastructure-as-a-service space, there needs to be technologies which make it seamless to be able to transition between on-premise and cloud. There needs to be interoperability between different environments because vendor or data centre lock in is too much of a risk for businesses.”

For eNerds CEO, Jamie Warner, the cloud represents the “wild west” of the channel, as vendors battle it out for increased market share.

“At the small business end of town, it’s loose in terms of a managed service provider being able to up skill immediately to become a cloud expert,” he said. “Then the choice is around partnering but who do you go with?

“We’ve been burnt a few times and sometimes we can be stuck in the middle.”

Channel clarityToday, the cloud market embedded within the channel remains at an inflection point, as complexities continue to impact how cloud technologies and applications are applied and delivered to market.

“What does this mean for traditional channel environments?” Avnet Technology Solutions channel manager, Anthony Carilla, asked.

“There’s a huge amount of channel partners in box land still operating as tin pushers. So what does cloud mean for this market?”

For Carilla, key questions now surface around the models that can be deployed in the market that are relevant and sustainable for resellers seeking new revenue streams through the cloud.

“The market is heading for an interesting period in terms of how partners can make the transition,” he added. “And it’s going to be challenging. The industry needs to create offerings which are relevant to these resellers so they can also take their customers on the cloud journey, without imploding at the same time.

“Currently there’s a lot of confusion out there for traditional resellers and they don’t know how the impact of cloud will be truly felt.”

Amidst the rising tide of cloud challenges impacting the core reseller base in Australia, vendors

are also reevaluating as the definition of a successful channel partner changes dramatically.

“Our traditional channel base is changing,” Veritas Technologies director of channel sales, Janet Docherty, added. “More of our partners are now offering a service to customers and looking to provide outcomes. Even though our partners have always been our customers, they’re becoming more like an end-user which changes the dynamics.

“We’re now working with

partners to ensure that we’re selling the right technology and that we’re helping build offerings around a partner’s offerings to ensure the customer wins.”

In a cloud context, both vendors and partners are realising the added value of committing to one another, banishing the long-held approach of favouring quantity over quality.

“We’re working with partners who actually want to work with us,” Docherty added. “We’re finding new ways to increase partner profitability and realise growth in markets while also recruiting new partners to help deliver innovative solutions to customers.”

Favoured by partners in equal measure, Meah believes the industry will experience a “big drop off” in the numbers of resellers who haven’t made the

“Partners want to work with a vendor

with a vision”

Nathan Lowe (ASI Solutions), Anthony Carilla

(Avnet) and Aaron Steppat (VMware) Dane Meah (InfoTrust) and John Kaleski (IBM)

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42 ROUNDTABLE/CLOUD

change, setting the stage for a landmark few years across the Australian channel.

“There’s a big difference between shipping boxes and delivering a service,” he said. “Vendors can’t scale quickly enough or don’t have the resources to go in-depth with a customer, which is how the partner can be of value.

“For those shipping licenses or boxes, now is the time to shift into the trusted advisor role and adopt consulting capabilities. But when the rubber hits the road, it’ll be interesting to see who survives.”

Next stepsLooking ahead, Lowe believes that while cloud continues to capture the imagination of the Australian market, the need for on-premise technology still remains.

“The traditional side of the business is always going to be there,” he said. “It’s a hybrid model and we’ve transitioned from being a traditional box builder to offering deeper levels of value to the customer. You can’t stay still in this market and the last few years has seen more

change than the last 15 years.”With change charging at the

channel at an unrelenting pace, value can be found through a services approach to cloud, in response to a shift in how end-users consume technology.

“The fastest growing part of our business is through our service provider partners,” Docherty added. “There’s an increased demand for paying for services on a monthly basis and our business and channel is

heading in this direction.“While we want our

partners to change, we realise that no partner would consider us if we didn’t change also and that’s why we’re investing in our strategies to ensure we remain relevant.”

Backed up by Carilla, for partners to excel through the cloud, vendors must also respond

and change accordingly.“Vendors must look at

partners and the wider channel not as a cost of doing business, but as a customer retention strategy,” Carilla added. “That means sharing revenues and margins differently and creating models that reflect the market today.

“It’s time for a real change of mind and for the channel to show true collaboration to ensure partners can deliver value through the customers.”

For Lowe, vendors that can document clear strategies around cloud will continue to win the mindshare of partners, emphasising the overriding need for clarity in 2016 and beyond.

“Partners want to work with a vendor with a vision,” he added. “They know where they want to be but the vendors which don’t have this, or are reluctant to share, are of great concern.

“If they have no long-term plan then the channel should be weary because partners value sharing knowledge and information, assessing where the market is heading and what solutions will best meet the demands of the customer.”

Underpinning this is the need to do more with less, a rule which was once the exception but is now working towards being the channel norm.

“It’s about creating deeper relationships with fewer vendors,” Kennedy added. “It all comes down to uniqueness and value.”

In creating deeper partnerships with a select group of vendors, Kennedy believes partners can subsequently set themselves apart in increasingly crowded marketplace.

“There’s a huge opportunity for partners to bring their own intellectual capital to the table,” Kaleski added. “It’s time for the channel to develop something that’s unique and to work with the larger vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and Google because we can’t move as fast as our customers want us to.

“If you’re got something unique and you work on the niche spots within the market, then you have the potential to provide real value.”

This roundtable was sponsored by Avnet, IBM and Veritas Technologies.

“On the whole I think most organisations are excited by cloud, but they

just don’t know why they are excited”

Alex Kennedy (Datacom)

Janet Docherty (Veritas)


44 THE HOT LIST

Barhead SolutionsKen StruthersGENERAL MANAGER

NUMBER OF STAFF: 20

AGE OF COMPANY:

ONE YEAR OLD

> PRODUCTS/SOLUTIONS IT BRINGS TO MARKET: Barhead delivers

solutions based on

Microsoft Dynamics 365

and the associated suite

of products. We provide

Customer Relationship

Management (CRM)

solutions enhanced with

analytics and machine

based learning, customer

and partner portals,

Internet of Things,

BOT technologies, field

service and the new

Microsoft Dynamics

365 project services.

> BUSINESS DIFFERENTIATOR: Founded by the same

team that founded Cloud

Sherpas (a platinum

Salesforce partner

acquired by Accenture),

Barhead is uniquely

positioned to provide

pragmatic advice and

expertise on a range of

cloud CRM technologies.

With almost 20 years of

CRM experience, and

the last ten being cloud

only, the Barhead team

understands how best to

use Microsoft Dynamics

365 to deliver business

value.

> FUTURE PLANS: Barhead believes in the

Microsoft stack and is

investing in educating

the broader market

on the capabilities

of Dynamics 365 and

associated tools. Future

plans include launching

a strategic analytics

practice, expansion

across the east coast of

Australia, and launching

our Dynamics 365

for financial services

accelerator on the

Microsoft Appsource.

> KEY MESSAGE TO THE CHANNEL IN 2016: For the last ten years,

Salesforce has not had

a competitor. Microsoft

Dynamics 365 changes

this paradigm. Barhead

sees this as a great

opportunity to give

customers a choice and

deploy solutions that

best suit their needs, at

a reasonable price point.

The Hot List: companies to watchHafizah Osman asks partners to file reports on their companies.

SaasabiDavid MerchantCEO

NUMBER OF STAFF: SIX

AGE OF COMPANY: FOUR YEARS OLD

> PRODUCTS/SOLUTIONS IT BRINGS TO MARKET: Saasabi delivers cloud-based business intelligence

(BI) and analytics tools for better, data-driven

decision-making. Saasabi offers solutions for

independent software vendors, systems integrators

and consultants, governments, accountants,

franchisors and nonprofits.

All Saasabi solutions are delivered as software-

as-a-service and are built upon the Saasabi

OLAP engine. Architected for performance in the

cloud, the Saasabi engine offers an elastic and

parallel architecture.

> BUSINESS DIFFERENTIATOR: We have two main

business differentiators - flexibility and affordability.

Because we are a cloud provider, we’re not using

virtual machines as most other BI vendors do. This

gives us the ability to deliver a more flexible solution

in terms of provisioning resources. For example, an

accountancy can scale up compute power to meet

financial year-end requirements and scale back

down once demand

subsides. Partners

can also deploy our

analytics engine at a

fraction of the cost of

similar solutions.

> FUTURE PLANS: We

will continue to expand

the performance and

functionality of the

Saasabi engine, and

we plan to expand

our offerings for the

government sector over

the coming months.

> KEY MESSAGE TO THE CHANNEL IN 2016: If you’re

not selling your customers business intelligence and

analytics functionality, jump on board now. With the

proliferation of BI providers in the market, someone

else will sell it to them if you’re not doing so.


THE HOT LIST 45

Converged Communication Network Applications (CCNA)Craig SimsOPERATIONS DIRECTOR

NUMBER OF STAFF: 54

AGE OF COMPANY: EIGHT YEARS OLD

> PRODUCTS/SOLUTIONS IT BRINGS TO MARKET: Converged

Communication

Network

Applications

Pty Ltd (CCNA)

offers unified

communications,

contact centre,

wired and wireless

networking

network

applications and data centre solutions either

as a hosted or premised based either CAPEX or

OPEX sales.

We deliver leading technology solutions

and services within the enterprise,

government, and carrier market place.

The innovative design, development, and

implementation of converged communication

network applications are our core area of

expertise. Our approach is to provide our

customers with a flexible outcome driven road

map to their technology needs.

CCNA focuses on ensuring network

continuity for the above applications and other

real time service offerings. Our convergence

design and implementation planning is initially

focused on ensuring customer network readiness

for deploying any converged applications.

> BUSINESS DIFFERENTIATOR: What sets us

apart is providing end-to-end business based IT

solutions with exceptional service.

> FUTURE PLANS: We aim to continue growing

our hosted solution customer based by offering

exceptional service and growing by customer

references. CCNA partners closely across Asia

and the world with a range of other IT service

providers offering complimentary solution

offerings which enables great growth.

> KEY MESSAGE TO THE CHANNEL IN 2016: Relationships within the IT industry are important.

CCNA works closely with other IT service providers

to deliver good customer solutions.

NTT Communications ICT SolutionsJulie BarbieriNATIONAL SALES

DIRECTOR

NUMBER OF STAFF:

200 (AUSTRALIA)

AGE OF COMPANY:

THREE YEARS OLD

(WITH 20 YEARS

EXPERIENCE IN THE

LOCAL MARKET)

> PRODUCTS/SOLUTIONS IT BRINGS TO MARKET: NTT ICT

provides the secure

IT foundations of

network, data centre,

infrastructure, cloud

and security that

enables smooth IT

operations combined

with the scalability

and innovation to

help organisations

transform for

the future.

>BUSINESS DIFFERENTIATOR: NTT ICT specialises in

harmonising existing

technology investments

with next generation

ICT, to provide the best

ROI for Australian

customers. We have

a unique operating

model that combines

a depth of local

engineering expertise in

the delivery of network,

cloud, security and

technology services,

with the backing of NTT

ICT’s global reach and

investment in services

and innovation.

> FUTURE PLANS: We

are focused on continuing

to anticipate and provide

the products and services

our customers need.

Whether it be providing

infrastructure, IaaS,

global connectivity

or helping manage

legacy systems whilst

offering flexible

commercial models, we

will continue to meet

the high expectations

of our customers

who are impacted

by the fast evolving

digital landscape.

> KEY MESSAGE TO THE CHANNEL IN 2016: It’s all about what the

customer needs and we

at NTT ICT equip our

people to provide the

best operational and

commercial outcome

for our customers. With

the backing of a global

company, and a strong

partner network locally,

we have the flexibility

to respond quickly to

the changing market

dynamics and

requirements of

our customers.

“It’s all about what the customer needs”


46 CHANNEL COACHING

H istorically, long-standing

business success stories

in Australia have stemmed

from a company’s ability to capture

new markets.

In realising the potential of

emerging business approaches

through new products, customers

or vertical specialisation, partners

can first remain relevant, and then

crucially stimulate long-term growth.

By winning in new markets, the

channel can generate additional

sources of profit, while bolstering

market share in an often saturated

and competitive environment, which

in turn helps builds customer loyalty.

“Ultimately, it’s relationships that

must underpin a business expansion

strategy,” HTG Peer Group general

manager of Asia Pacific, Stuart

Applegate, said.

“I think relationships open doors

to other markets. Whether that is a

vendor relationship or relationships

with other partners. Relationship

building at events is also key as well

as with customers.”

As a result, Applegate offered

three key tips to help all aspects of

the partner community expand and

extract new business in markets.

Leverage vendor networksFrom a channel perspective,

Applegate believes a reseller’s

relationship with a vendor

continues to form an “absolutely

critical” part of the equation.

“At HTG, it’s the relationship

culture we emphasise,” he explained.

“We try to instil that personal

relationships between partners and

vendors are mandatory.”

Top 3 ways to capture new marketsIn this newly created column, Holly Morgan, examines ways partners can enable growth through new strategies and approaches, reminding the channel to work on all areas of the business to enable ongoing transformation.

vendor reps walking in with you

and supporting you during a deal,”

he explained.

Collaborate with other partnersApplegate believes partner-to-

partner collaboration is a powerful

mechanism that can enable a

business to transcend markets

from both a geographical and

vertical perspective.

“We see partner-to-partner

collaboration everyday at HTG,” he

said. “Through putting a traditional

managed services provider in the

room with a traditional managed

print provider, they then have the

opportunity to share best practices

and ideas.

“These are two guys that are

technically competing, but in this

moment the sharing pays off

for both.”

Similarly, in Applegate’s experience

of managing a partner peer group

that brings together partners

from different areas, collaboration

between businesses in various areas,

allows local insights that can be

applied to aid expansion strategy

from one city base to another.

Get involvedEvery customer is essentially part

of a community and if partners

have presence, new networks and

relationships can be formed as

a result.

Applegate has witnessed many

partners succeed in transcending new

markets by continuing to be active in

their respective communities.

“Industry events are very effective

to learn the possibilities of new

markets,” he added.

“Partners should utilise vendor

networks to discover when things

are happening in certain places. They

should also leverage tech media to

tap into new communities.”

If a partner is trying to expand

business opportunities, Applegate

believes value can be found through

planning such a strategy with

appropriate vendor parties.

“If a partner is trying to expand

into a new market such as WiFi for

example, the first place they should

seek advice and information from

is the vendor currently operating

at that level. Then partners must

work through their business plan

together with the vendor and share

who they are trying to target in that

new market.

“This demonstrates a committed

partner to the vendor and vice versa.

They will walk hand in hand together

as a result of that.”

Meanwhile, for partners

expanding into new markets

geographically, once again,

Applegate believes the local vendor

relationship remains key.

“Nothing works as well as local

“Ultimately, it’s relationships that must underpin a business expansion strategy”

Stuart Applegate


SECRET RESELLER 47

Lessons learned from dealing with the big boysARN’s partners inside the industry lift the lid on the real world of the channel.

In response, I emailed my account

manager with a message littered with

bold red font, indicating my anger in

the most sensible manner possible.

A pitiful phone call soon followed

which I flatly rejected, leading to a

call from the supervisor to insist this

was merely a mistake, along with

numerous statements of apology.

Naturally this triggered a chain

reaction with several senior figures

within the vendor then expressing

concern as a result, but at this stage

it was too late.

So what’s the moral of this all

too familiar story? If you’re not a big

player, you’re nothing.

I know it’s a regular rant but

vendors are experts at putting on

large conferences crammed with

hoop-la – of which I’ve been to

countless times – which all include

the same song and dance.

It merely provides a platform

for shallow phrases such “we

support the channel”, to “without the

channel, we are nothing”, or worse

still, “support us and we can assure

you we’ll grow together”.

It’s a complete falsehood because

the message is aimed squarely at

the tier-1 accounts, the accounts

that offer millions of revenue a year.

But we are just a bunch of sheep,

we blindly follow bad vendors which

is why I’ve since converted all my

business to custom white-box PC

and servers.

They offer exactly what I want,

when I want it and I don’t have to

answer or announce my customers

to anyone.

I’ve found that they offer the

same level of service and support

and because my customers trust

me to provide the best solution, then

that’s good enough for me.

To those resellers like me reading

this – there is another path you can

take without consequence. Go your

own way.

If the vendor won’t back you when

you’re trying to do it their way, then

what’s the point in jumping through

all those hoops in the first place?

For partners wanting to submit their views

anonymously, please get in touch via

[email protected]

I ’ve been in the computer

industry for over 20 years and

during this time, I’ve experienced

my fair share of vendors going

behind my back and selling direct.

It happens all too often but you

just have to move on in this game.

Several months ago however,

after quoting a job for a customer, I

requested bid pricing from a vendor

and went through the usual process

of providing end user details.

A week later and I receive an

email from the vendor indicating

the confirmation stock keeping

unit (SKU) for the end-user, with a

request to obtain the final price from

the distributor using a reference

number, of which I began to do.

But in scrolling through the

email thread of dialogue I noticed

something amiss.

At first it all appeared normal,

with the vendor support staff asking

the customer if they dealt with a

preferred reseller, of which my client

said yes, and named my company.

Pretty standard procedure

perhaps, until I scrolled down further

to find the same vendor asking if my

customer would consider working

with another reseller.

Despite my customer insisting a

preference for dealing with us, the

vendor replied: “We have a better

reseller who can give you better

pricing and support, would you like

for me to give you their details?”

Naturally, I’m furious.

But as I continue reading I can see

the vendor badgering the customer

even more to not buy kit from us, and

instead go with a different reseller.

I couldn’t believe what I was

reading and as you can appreciate,

by this stage, I was not seeing red, I

was on fire.

What’s worse is that this

particular vendor had pulled this

stunt several times before.

“What’s worse is that this particular

vendor had pulled this

stunt several times before”


48 ROUNDTABLE/MSP BUSINESS

Building an MSP BusinessAs traditional box-shifting models erode over time, resellers are finding motivation in building a managed service provider business - Hafizah Osman reports.

Triggered by the rise of new technologies and changing customer

demands, partners are turning toward providing services to stay profitable.

Yet in Australia, a clear definition of what an MSP is still alludes the channel.

But despite an increased need for partners to transition, migrating from point A to point B is fraught with complexities and challenges.

Across the industry, the growth of the IT services market is proliferating, creating a desire for traditional resellers to make the transition towards a more lucrative future.

In short, companies that provide managed technology services to customers have expectations of high revenue growth over the next two years, triggering further growth within the industry.

As result, APC by Schneider Electric Pacific channels and alliances general manager, Muralee Kanagaratnam, said partners are evolving from traditional VARs and SIs, moving into the MSP space at a rapid rate.

“We want to be there – whether the solutions are different or the same, it doesn’t matter for us,” he said.

“It’s about being able to support our partners who call themselves an MSP and being able to provide a solution that fits their demands.”

Optimism aside however, challenges for MSPs remain, with many struggling to understand exactly how to define service offerings to the market.

“They don’t understand what they’re trying to achieve with their business,” StorageCraft Asia-Pacific senior disaster

Muralee Kanagaratnam (APC by Schneider

Electric) and David Cleminson (StratosQuo)

recovery planning architect, Jack Alsop, said.

“If you ask any of them – ‘what is your service offering?’ – you will receive a blank stare in response, and you simply know it’s either pushing stuff uphill or it isn’t going to go anywhere.”

Delving deeper, Cavalry director, Barry Silic, believes the definition of an MSP is continually changing, causing challenges for the channel as a consequence.

For Silic, 15 years ago an MSP was viewed as a managed support provider that wraps support around a solution, with its role transitioning into a managed solutions provider today.

“It’s heavily driven by the customer,” he explained. “The customer wants to consume their IT today as-a-service and we translate that to a MSP model Kirk Jones (AC3) and James Henderson (ARN)


MSP BUSINESS/ROUNDTABLE 49

to actually deliver the solutions to the customer.

“So the solutions that we’re creating today are different to what we did 15 years ago in the MSP environment.”

Yet for Brennan IT executive general manager, Simon Barlow, MSPs are all becoming a bit passé with differentiation as a service route, with questions now remaining as to how different they can be.

“I’d rather be a managed value provider,” he explained. “I need to understand from my customer’s perspective where we truly add value into their business.

“It’s about understanding, in a deeply seated way, the customer’s business drivers and outcomes and adding value for the services that you provide back into their business to enable them to grow.”

According to AC3 software solutions manager, Kirk Jones, however, the issue lies in finding vendors that have a product that works well with MSP solutions.

“From a cloud and MSP perspective, instead of just having normal procurement transactional type products, it makes sense to have something that fits in with us,” he said.

“It’s not all about banging on

Barry Silic (Cavalry); Jack Alsop (StorageCraft) and Tristan Warner (eNerds)

Cam Wayland (Channel Dynamics)

the door wanting us to sell products, but whether it will fit in with our business model.”

Echoing Jones’ observations, eNerds chief technology officer, Tristan Warner, explained that vendors today remain “very product oriented”, with customers also adding deeper layers of complexity to the MSP mix.

“A lot of clients, because they might not have the relevant technical people, don’t really know what they want but have a gut feeling that something is not right,” he explained.

“So it can be challenging to flush out their thoughts and feelings. Getting a competitive advantage means businesses ask the ‘what else’ question and it’s up to us to try to proactively be ahead of that.

“Also, there’s no off the shelf billing platform that solves our problems.”

Specific to end-users, StratosQuo CEO and founder, David Cleminson, believes many C-level executives classify MSP solutions as a utility.

“Sometimes, you’re looking at someone who’s not IT literate and he’s buying a service,” he said.

“That actually causes challenges for an MSP to differentiate their service because if you’re going in selling a utility, there’s no perceived value in that.”

Barlow said that through moving up the stack, some MSPs win larger IT deals that aren’t box droppers, but project services take a hit as it’s the first thing that is discounted, or even given away.

“When you’re competing with some of the bigger guys, they go ‘oh yeah, we’ll just install it’,” he explained.

“What that does is take your pay back on that deal from three to four months to six to 12 months. And if you get stuck in that, you go back to selling tin just to prop the business up for a little while.

“It completely confuses your sales force; you’ll dilute your value proposition and the market won’t know what you are.”

Vendor aidKaseya Asia-Pacific technical director, Craig Allen, said the

“If you try to be everything to everyone, you get stuck in this transition”



evolution of the MSP has resulted in vendors selling outcomes instead of product.

“We’ve had to change the way that we sell our products because just selling software and features isn’t good enough,” he said.

“MSPs see a thousand different vendors with a massive list of different features, but how does that turn into a business conversation to wrap a service around?”

Consequently, Allen believes vendors need to provide different ways that customers can consume services.

“We’ve still got perpetual licensing and we still got SasS offerings,” he added.

“AWS and migration in the cloud has changed how people pay for software and I think it’s forcing vendors to be more flexible about the way that MSPs can use and consume their services.”

Furthermore, Channel Dynamics director and co-founder, Cam Wayland, said vendors must understand that MSPs are now essentially the end-user in the equation.

“There are only a few vendors that have been able to manage

the MSP program versus the traditional resell program,” he said.

“Some have merged them successfully into one, but the big end of town chasing the big dollar sale fail to do so.”

In agreement with Wayland, Kanagaratnam said a traditional vendor partner program and an MSP program don’t go hand in hand as the consumption models differ.

“The customers are very different,” he added. “The traditional VAR/ SI is very different in terms of consumption model to an MSP.”

Yet Kanagaratnam acknowledged that occasionally, traditional resellers put on a different hat, blurring the lines between VARs and MSPs.

“That’s something that we’re trying to distinguish, but some say they’re an MSP or just a buyer; and a few of them define themselves as both,” he said.

“That’s where some hybrid VARs struggle in terms of having to transition their business to provide for managed services support with MSP service levels.”

Customer cultureFrom a partner perspective, Warner believes MSP success can be achieved through adopting the trusted advisor role, fostering and maintaining a strong relationship with customers.

“One of the ways MSPs are differentiating themselves is articulating the business benefit that comes with the service, but also looking at different services to roll to be relevant with the changing environments,” he said.

“The key differentiator is methodology, experience and commitments to ensure we meet those outcomes that the business owners want.

“The trust is imperative to having a customer not look around for alternatives. If you can, keep their focus on you. We have to be very clear on what it is our clients want, have the products and services and so on that solve that and not get too

(L-R) Tristan Warner (eNerds), David Cleminson (StratosQuo), Hafizah Osman (ARN), Simon Barlow (Brennan

IT), James Henderson (ARN), Jack Alsop (StorageCraft), Craig Allen (Kaseya), Kirk Jones (AC3), Cam

Wayland (Channel Dynamics), Barry Silic (Cavalry), Muralee Kanagaratnam (APC by Schneider Electric)

James Henderson (ARN); Simon Barlow (Brennan IT) and Craig Allen (Kaseya)

“Getting a competitive advantage means businesses ask the ‘what else’ question”

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distracted from the noise.”Going one step further, Alsop

believes resellers fail to add value as a result of the confusion in the market over two-hatted MSPs/VARs.

“There’s no value-add whatsoever,” he explained. “And that’s a serious challenge because the end-user is coming directly to the vendor asking for professional services etc and I’ve got to put bills together to go through this guy.”

As a result, Alsop said MSPs should adopt a more professional approach to solve the business

problem a customer has.“The business problem is, it’s

costing a fortune for IT,” he acknowledged. “The MSP has got to become the business model for the customer and the business manager for them as well in addition to helping them with everything else.”

MSP directionSilic said those that serve as two-hatted MSPs/VARs should work on which direction they want to take and stick to it as it changes the revenue models.

“You can’t be a two-headed person,” he said. “But it’s a really tough thing for an IT company to

change from a typical VAR to an MSP where now, it’s about monthly invoices.

“If you don’t have the systems in place, they’re going to eat into all your profit and you’re going to end up with nothing.”

In short, Wayland branded the change as the “cash flow valley of death”.

In terms of financing, MSPs have to consider a variety of options. Is it the MSP that takes the cut? Or are vendors and distributors supposed to play a role in this as well?

Wayland said a few

distributors have recently started offering finance offerings.

“It’s now one of their differentiators in addition to the cloud portals and their aggregation, their billing systems and that sort of thing,” he explained.

“The next level is to being able to offer finance to allow the partner to be able to either buy build or buy deploy on behalf of the customer.

“But in saying that, some vendors such as HP and Cisco have been offering finance and creative finance free (on the services) from day one. But more and more distributors are doing this. It’s a tight rope and it’s not

Craig Allen (Kaseya); Muralee Kanagaratnam (APC by

Schneider Electric) and David Cleminson (StratosQuo)Barry Silic (Cavalry) and Jack Alsop (StorageCraft)

easy. If it was really easy, everyone would do it.”

Looking ahead, Jones added that it’s about picking the right partners and vendors.

“Pick the key ones and they will help you transition,” he said. “Instead of telling a partner and a customer what they want, it’s now Mr. customer or Mr. partner how can we make our program fit to work with your business?”

Cleminson advised the channel that critical and focused thinking is what will pull an MSP through.

“Know what you are and what

you are not and don’t do what you’re not,” he said. “If you try to be everything to everyone, you get stuck.

“Make some decisions; reevaluate your vendors; have a look at their compensation structure and their programs to make sure it aligns with where you’re actually going and then you can make the right choices to support your business.

“Also, reinvent yourself, keep yourself fresh, and make sure your identity is correct.” This roundtable was sponsored by APC by Schneider Electric and StorageCraft. Photos by Maria Stefina.

“It’s not all about banging on the door wanting us to sell products, but whether it will fit in with our business model”

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1 2 3 4


54 TECHWATCH/IOT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing how both operational and strategic security decisions are executed, with devices increasing the size of the threat landscape - Hafizah Osman investigates.

SECURING THE INTERNET OF


The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing how both operational and strategic security decisions are executed, with devices increasing the size of the threat landscape - Hafizah Osman investigates.n


TECHWATCH/IOT 55

Even though in its infancy, IoT is showing staggering growth across

several verticals.Integrated services,

information security solutions, data analytics, connectivity and the convergence of operational technology and IT all bring together significant possibilities.

Devices that were once disconnected have now become connected and intelligent, offering the ability to connect, communicate and learn, enabling local organisations to monitor, automate, analyse and control different aspects of the business.

But as IoT triggers the next industrial revolution – aptly named Industry 4.0 – the channel has also witnessed the rapid rise of its overriding downside, through the growth of cyber security.

As data explodes across the enterprise through IoT, security remains an ongoing challenge in Australia.

And it asks a simple question – can the enterprise be secured in an IoT world?

Recent Gartner findings show that as IoT creates a pervasive digital presence, connecting

For Howe, there is much to be done regarding cyber security maturity for the IoT.

“In a recent case, a million connected devices infected with malware, including cameras and recording devices, were used as a botnet to launch a record-breaking Denial of Service (DDoS) attack,” he added.

“In the aftermath of that attack, the source code that powered the botnet was released publicly, giving access to anyone who could do a Google search.

“The malicious code sweeps the internet for any IoT devices that have factory default or hard-coded passwords and infects them. This is a wake-up call for anyone in the IoT space.”

According to Howe, what needs to shift is the mindset, from being secured to being resilient.

“It is no longer a question of if you will be attacked but when,” he explained.

“This is why businesses need to assess where they are at today and determine how ready they are to detect and respond should an attack hit.”

WatchGuard Technologies A/NZ regional director, David Higgins, believes a primary concern with IoT is the lack of security by design.

“Many IoT devices weren’t built with network security in mind,” he added.

“Because of this, the devices can expose network services they shouldn’t, don’t encrypt communications, and often ship with weak default or hardcoded passwords that some users don’t change.

“Also, many of the vendors creating IoT devices use off-the-shelf, embedded operating systems with well-known vulnerabilities, and don’t take the time to harden them, or remove

organisations and society as a whole, security decision makers must embrace fundamental principles of risk and resilience to drive change.

“New security thinking must incorporate the blurring of the physical and digital lines of businesses and society itself by gathering and using data about the physical and digital business, effecting physical and digital changes as well,” Gartner analyst, Earl Perkins, said.

Locally speaking, LogRhythm A/NZ director of sales, Simon Howe, believes IoT has changed how businesses approach security, with many organisations feeling more threatened than before.

“Cyber security has always been a conversation that financial institutions and governments were interested in, but it now includes other industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, utilities and even educational institutions,” he said.

g ,automate, analyse and controldifferent aspects of the business.

But as IoT triggers the next industrial revolution – aptly named Industry 4.0 – the channel has also witnessed the rapid rise of its overriding downside, through the growthof cyber security.

As data explodes across theenterprise through IoT, security remains an ongoing challenge in Australia.

And it asks a simple question – can the enterprise be securedin an IoT world?

Recent Gartner findings showthat as IoT creates a pervasivedigital presence, connecting

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56 TECHWATCH/IOT

unnecessary components.”While some of these software flaws

can be patched, Higgins said users and vendors aren’t used to updating a device’s firmware as often as normal software.

With IoT connecting mission- or life-critical devices – such as cars, health care equipment, and energy grids – to the internet, Higgins said it makes the risk much higher.

“There are many things IoT vendors can do to ship less risky devices,” he added.

“It’s up to these vendors to design some security into their products at the get go. In the meantime, there are also some basic practices IT admins can implement to minimise the risk posed by less secure IoT products.”

Securing the enterpriseIxia solutions marketing senior director, Areg Alimian, believes the industry sits at a “critical inflection point” in business and technology where globalisation, IoT, cloud, virtualisation, and mobile devices are forcing companies to extend the network edge, often into places where they cannot easily gain visibility.

“The business data exchanged between on-premise applications running at the branch office, private data centres, and the public cloud increases the complexity of maintaining the end-to-end visibility needed to identify and predict network outages, find a security breach, and analyse mission-critical application performance issues,” he said.

Alimian believes IoT will only add additional visibility challenges, prompting a need to rethink business approaches to end-to-end visibility and security in an increasingly-complex virtualised world.

Consequently, Alimian suggested eliminating network visibility blind spots throughout the entire physical and virtualised environment; enabling IT to be more effective with existing monitoring tools; enabling better intelligence to increase network

“IoT devices will continue to evolve, includes more and more functions,” Check Point Software Technologies chief strategist, Tony Jarvis, said.

“And with this evolution, it increases the “unknown” and each device becomes a new entry point for a cyber attack.

“So the biggest challenge for enterprise is to balance the monetisation of IoT with the securing IoT.”

In addition, Jarvis said information privacy must be balanced with the need for businesses to innovate and better understand customers.

“IoT devices will result in significantly increased volumes of information being generated about individuals,” he added.

“This has already sparked debate as to who will have access to such information and what it can be used for.

“IoT offers many benefits, but we need to think seriously about security and ensure they are not used as surveillance tools used to keep track of our activities without our permission.

“Keep in mind - new technologies open the door to many benefits, but also create

opportunities for attackers.”

FUTURE OF IoT SECURITY

been a cadre of promising platforms and processing engines emerge that are vastly more efficient than their predecessors.

“Today we can clearly see that the benefits of IoT eclipse any perceived challenges,” she added.

and application performance and minimising mission-critical application downtime.

“End-to-end, pervasive network visibility is fast becoming a best practice strategy,” he added.

“Organisations can’t defend against what they can’t see, and there are so many possible intrusion points in a network.

“Administrators need access to, and visibility of, critical applications and data throughout any virtual network or cloud environment across the operational technology (OT) and IT network edge, or core infrastructure, and private or public cloud.”

MapR Technologies technology strategy vice-president, Crystal Valentine, said security has traditionally been a challenge in the IoT space because data streams are often replicated across data centres in order to inform multiple analytical applications.

“For example, a single data stream from a connected car might be used simultaneously by a smart city application to improve traffic flow, an insurance company to price a pay-as-you-drive policy, and an automotive manufacturer to do predictive analytics and preempt maintenance issues,” Valentine added.

“Replicating a secure data stream to be leveraged by different groups or entities has traditionally been a challenge.”

Valentine added that IoT applications are favoured because of the “tremendous opportunity” they provide to businesses and organisations looking to find new areas of competitive advantage.

“The ability to react to data in real-time means companies can now make operational decisions while business is happening,” she added.

“This opportunity brings with it increasing requirements around data and processing capabilities.”

As a result, Valentine said new technologies are needed to support these new applications, but there has


58 TECHWATCH/IOT


Channel playTenable Network Security A/NZ regional sales manager, Matthew Brigham, said many enterprises are looking to security partners for

expertise, advice and experience.To be successful in this space,

partners will have to integrate managed services into their offering, and focus on a small number of core technologies.

With this strategic focus, partners can apply their expertise and skills to become an integrated extension of their customers’ security teams, he mentioned.

“With security resources stretched, it’s very difficult for IT teams to skill up and become experts in their field,” he said.

“This is where partners can play an important role. It’s critical that the channel doesn’t just focus on one area of security, such as the network, data centres, servers or endpoints; they must have complete visibility across their entire IT environment.”

Brigham added that even traditional resellers can benefit from this space.

“No matter what technology a traditional partner may sell or support, security should be a priority topic,” he added.

“This is an opportunity for partners to help their customers better understand their network, and advise them of technologies and solutions that will give them the comprehensive security program they need.”

Furthermore, Zscaler A/NZ marketing manager, Chris Stephens, said partners need to provide a range of security services to minimise the security risk of IoT to customers.

“These services may include audit of IoT assets and environment, security

architecting, penetration testing and remediation,” he said.

“Developing consulting expertise specifically focused on IoT environments such as manufacturing will differentiate them in the market.”

For the traditional channel, Stephens said this is an extension of existing corporate network security expertise.

“Traditional security appliance-based solutions simply cannot scale to cope with the exponential growth in IoT,” he added.

“Instead, IoT security will moved into a cloud based security model, where devices connect directly to a security solution in the cloud, ensuring they are always secure.”

Therefore, the traditional channel should be looking to expand the skill set of their staff and the range of services they provide.

Stephens said that it may be necessary to build relationships with the next generation of security providers whose solutions are effective in an IoT environment.

ar


60 TECHWATCH/SECURING IOT

As the Australian IoT market grows, bringing opportunities for innovation along the way,

pockets of potential are surfacing for resellers across the country.

“Data is growing exponentially and the value this can bring us is exciting,” Empired data insights national business manager, Ben Johnson, said.

“The industry can’t foresee where IoT-enabled technology will take society in the coming years and, as organisations continue to trial programs, new use cases will continue to emerge.

“While IoT technology has been around for decades, the Australian industry still has a long way to go to start getting value from IoT.”

But Johnson believes that organisations need to manage a balance between experimenting and innovating with data, and ensuring adequate privacy and security of data.

“Best practice includes organisations being aware and accountable for their IoT data,” he added.

“Clear policies around what data can be collected and stored, whether that data needs to be stored on premise, and whether storage needs to be restricted to Australian territory should form the basis of the organisation’s data security policy.”

According to Johnson, industries such as manufacturing and mining are making the most of the technology available already, while other industries are just scratching the surface.

“Importantly, it’s not the IoT that drives value for businesses,” he

added. “The real value comes from the analytics that is applied to IoT.”

Johnson added that the potential benefits of effectively analysing data are profound.

From better business decisions, lower costs, improved sales and a healthier bottom line, Johnson said effectively analysing data can be transformative for organisations.

Delving deeper, Empired networks and security national business manager, Mark Blower, said securing the IoT can be a challenge for organisations as more devices connect

to business networks, particularly as employees increasingly bring their own devices from home and demand to be able to connect from anywhere.

“This means new, unsecured devices and internet connections can be used,” he explained.

“If one device is unsecured, it can leave the entire network vulnerable to cyberattacks. It’s therefore important that the business has an accurate understanding of all endpoints on the network and policies in place to secure them.”

Simply put, Blower said an enterprise is never 100 per cent secure.

“Security is a cat and mouse scenario with the hackers always

trying to find vulnerabilities and access data maliciously,” he explained.

“But the advancement in security trends with sandboxing and zero-day threat analysis have taken significant steps in ensuring that an enterprise ICT environment is protected from known and unknown threats.”

According to Blower, organisations must balance between experimenting and innovating with data, while ensuring adequate privacy and security measures are taken.

“Clear policies around what data can be collected and stored,

whether that data needs to be stored on premise, and whether storage needs to be restricted to Australian territory should form the basis of the organisation’s data security policy,” he added.

Looking ahead, Blower said partners and service providers can

help customers become open to discovering new use cases for data by experimenting through analytics, maximising new opportunities along the way.

“It can be easy for organisations that collect massive amounts of data to become overwhelmed by the sheer volume and potential, and lose sight of how the data can actually help the business achieve its vision and objectives,” he said.

“It’s important that the business starts with clear goals in mind when embarking on a new IoT campaign to ensure they return insights that they can act on. And channel partners can help them with this.”

PARTNER PERSPECTIVE - EMPIRED

“The Australian industry still has a long way to go to start getting value from IoT”

Mark Blower Ben Johnson


PRODUCTS 61

F itbit has unveiled a

replacement device for the

hugely successful Charge and

Charge HR models.

The Fitbit Charge 2 is a

Bluetooth-enabled, fitness and

activity tracker which borders on

being a smartwatch.

Priced at $250 it’s more

expensive than its predecessors

but you do get more for your

money. It even comes with

replacement wrist straps available

for $50 and leather bands for $120

for the fashion conscious.

The Charge 2 is sweat and

rain-proof but don’t take it

swimming or wear it in the shower.

Fitbit’s app is still one of the

best long-term health tracking

systems on the market, and

consistently displays updated data,

as well as integrating with other

devices and services. It even

includes great extras like guided

breathing which is lacking on many

other fitness accessories.

But one of the most

impressive things about the

Fitbit was one of the first companies to make it big in the fitness tracker space - Chris Player charts its progress.

Fitbit Charge 2 – The new benchmark

Charge 2 is that unlike its

predecessors it is much more like

a fully fledged watch.

The bigger display meant we

were comfortable wearing it on its

own whereas with previous models

we felt the need to also wear a

normal watch.

The Charge 2 is highly

recommendable as either a fitness

or activity accessory. If you

have used any Fitbit

before, this will feel very

natural and if you are

looking for your first

smartwatch or

tracker, its a

great buy.

The Charge 2

is not only a great

replacement for

the Charge HR,

like the first

Charge, it has

become the new

benchmark which

all others will be

compared to in the

next year or more.

Fitbit Charge 2

ASUS ROG Swift PG348QGamers have a new best friend but one

which doesn’t come cheap. The ASUS ROG

Swift PG348Q is a beast that will transform

your gaming experience in a way no other

monitor we have seen in recent times

can match.

While the price tag of $2000 may make

your eyes water, the bang for buck is

unmistakable. The dimensions alone are

staggering, measuring an immense 34 inches

across the diagonal, it is an Ultra-Wide screen

with a 21:9 aspect ratio and a resolution of

3440 x 1440.

While earlier monitors of this size

caused issues for those sitting close to

the screen,the PG348Q solves this with

an ever-so-slight curve and the use of an

IPS panel. The 178 means there are no

colour or brightness issues when you

look towards the edge.

The design is striking and we have to say

we were impressed before we even turned it

on by the edgeless screen design and the

futuristic stand. Both HDMI and DisplayPort

are included, along with four USB 3.0 ports.

Asus claims a response time of 5ms, and

based on our tests we are inclined to agree. It

is also part of the company’s eye care range

and when put against other monitors, the

difference in picture is instantly noticeable.

While the PG348Q is definitely out of reach

for most gamers, the size almost eliminates

the need for dual screen (which is becoming

increasingly popular these days).

If you have this kind of money to drop on a

monitor, we can think of none better than this

one. It is not often you find a monitor that is a

joy to use and looks so good on the desk.

re

rst

2

at

h


62 COMMUNITY/MELBOURNE CUP

Channel cheers home Melbourne Cup winner at Dicker Data celebrationDicker Data hosted its annual Melbourne Cup celebration in partnership with ARN, bringing the channel together for the race that stops the nation. Over 300 vendor and reseller partners roared home winner, Almandin, at the swanky Zeta Bar in Sydney. Photos by Maria Stefina.

1 Jules Rumsey (Cloud Plus), Craig Somerville (The Somerville Group), David Hayes (The Somerville Group), Cam Wayland (Channel Dynamics)

2 Adrian Youl (Oriel), Darren Lynn (Uplinx), Cya Tonyin (AC3), Richard Mitton (BigAir)

3 Nick Beaugeard (HubOne), Nathan Lowe (ASI Solutions), Ian Welch (Dicker Data), Ben Johnson (Dicker Data)

4 Barry Silic (Cavalry), Anthony Miller (Cisco), Scott Atkinson (BigAir), Peter Low (Cavalry)

5 Chris Greatrex (Artis Group), Margaret Welna (Artis Group) and Mark Duckworth (Artis Group)

6 Rachel Williams (HP), Steven Lovelace (Dicker Data), Mark Freeman (HP), Damian Commane (Belkin)

7 Richard Mitton (BigAir), Meryl Palma (Hosted Network), Ben Town (Hosted Network)

8 Kate Davis (Dicker Data), Victoria Gertner (Datacom Systems), Fraser Browne (Datacom)

9 Paul Cooper (SoftwareOne) and Moheb Moses (Channel Dynamics)

10 Nicole Freeman (Lenovo), Seonha Francis (Citix) and Jo Dean (Citrix)

11 V.R. Rajkumar (Intel); Tony Trinh (Dicker Data); Frank Eagleton (Lenovo) and Nicole Freeman (Lenovo)

12 Mike Schultz (HP), Christian James (IBM Global Financing) and Ben Jackson (Dell)

13 Geoff Wright (Dell EMC) and Mary Stojcevski (Dicker Data)

1

2 3

4 5

6 7

8


MELBOURNE CUP/COMMUNITY 63

9 10

11

12 13

Judges’ Breakfast kicks off 2016 Women in ICT Awards (WIICTA)ARN kick-started the 2016 Women in ICT Awards program with its annual Judges’ Breakfast at The Hilton in Sydney, welcoming current and new judges to the panel.Photos by Maria Stefina.

1 2016 Women in ICT Awards Judges’ Breakfast

2 Susan Searle (ARN); John Donovan (ForgeRock) and Kerrie-Anne Turner (VMware)

3 Steve Martin (NEXTDC) and Nick Verykios (Arrow ECS ANZ)

4 Nicolette Moore (Optus Business)

5 Wendy O’ Keeffe (Westcon-Comstor)

1

2

5

3

4


64 COMMUNITY/WIICTA 2016

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Editorial published in ARN may not be reproduced in any form whatsoever

without written permission. Copyright 2016, IDG Communications

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IDG is the publisher of ARN and its website (www.arnnet.com.au). If you choose

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you may be required to provide information about yourself to IDG. IDG will use

this information to provide you with products or services you have requested,

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Communications Pty Ltd, Level 10, 15 Blue St, North Sydney, NSW, 2060.

ADVERTISING ACCOUNT DIRECTOR: Cherry Yumul

[email protected] (02) 9902 2756

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E VENTS MANAGER: Alexandra West [email protected] (02) 9902 2775

DATABASE CO-ORDINATOR: NIK GORBACHE V [email protected] (02) 9902 2784

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