Bulletproof co-founder and chief executive, Anthony Woodward
Sydney-based hosting and managed service provider, Bulletproof has signed a deal with the local division of global consultancy, Accenture, to formalise a collaboration agreement between the two companies.
The deal will see the two companies collaborate on cloud advisory, DevOps, cloud migration and support, all of which are strengths of Bulletproof. The deal means Accenture gains access to Bulletproof’s cloud-specific skill sets and feeds a pipeline of work to the MSP in enterprise and government projects.
Accenture A/NZ and Bulletproof are currently engaged on a number of “large joint opportunities”, according to a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) by Bulletproof.
The company said other opportunities were expected to follow and provide a “significant flow of work” for Bulletproof. The financial details of the current commercial arrangements were undisclosed.
The deal follows a trend predicted by Bulletproof’s largest vendor partner Amazon Web Services (AWS), which predicted and encouraged increased partner collaboration on skill dependent deployments like public cloud.
The company said the agreement combines its expertise in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and VMware private cloud, with Accenture’s local cloud consulting, implementation and support capabilities.
“We are very excited to be partnering with the leading provider of cloud-led digital transformation strategy for enterprise and government organisations in the Asia Pacific market,” Bulletproof CEO, Anthony Woodward, said in a statement. “We believe the two organisations bring a unique and market leading blend of capability to accelerate organisations’ cloud migration and transformation.”
Accenture operations managing director, Jordan Griffiths said the partnership strengthened the integrator’s local ecosystem and added capabilities which would support its client’s cloud transitions.
Bulletproof was the first IT provider in Australia to be awarded managed service provider status from AWS and was also the vendor’s first top tier partner in A/NZ. Accenture has been increasing its focus in the cloud arena in recent years and has also been working with new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
The announcement comes after some disappointing financial results from Bulletproof, which it attributed to a “relatively flat” March quarter in public cloud revenues. The company lowered its cloud revenue outlook for the year by $4 million as a result. This resulted in the company predicting a loss for the financial year of $1.5 million.
Woodward acknowledged the estimates were well below the company’s previous guidance, but said they still reflected a turnaround in underlying profitability from the first half of the financial year.
“We stress that the revenue and profit growth continue to be management’s core focus,” he said. “The factors reducing revenue growth from forecasts are being addressed through continued work on product offerings to mitigate churn, increase margins and grow profitable project and consulting work into FY18 and beyond.”
