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“And you can’t just move to the cloud, you’ve got to do it intelligently and understand its impact on services. Businesses in WA are now more accepting of it because they know it’s a better way of getting things done.”
As a national system integrator headquartered in Perth, Cirrus Networks has a bird’s eye view of the wider Australian market, allowing the business to assess market enthusiasm around security, end-user computing, data centre and storage solutions, alongside convergence and unified communications.
“In WA, we need assurances around latency issues,” Gilson added. “The way businesses consume data and access that data in the quickest time fame possible is paramount. Meeting those requirements are important.”
The state is taking relevant measures to improve problems arising from networks however, but despite this, Gilson advised businesses to take careful consideration when aligning with providers.
“The problem is getting much better,” he acknowledged. “There are more network organisations and providers that are increasing their bandwidth and their availability. But for a lot of organisations that are running mission critical production environments, they need to think very carefully about who their providers are.”
Through building on the potential of cloud, Gilson believes the market must also further capitalise on emerging technologies such as IoT and big data.
The pledge comes as Tasmania embarks on becoming a Smart City, through an IoT-ready partnership between TasmaNet and Thinxtra.
Such a deal - designed to build a dedicated IoT network that will cover 95 per cent of the population - highlights the progress of other states and territories across Australia in leveraging new capabilities through technology, a stance WA must now take to keep pace.
“Especially for the WA market,” Gilson stressed. “Being able to take data that customers consume to drive proper value and differentiate them from the competitors is massively important.”
Due to the economic conditions of WA, Gilson said the state is heavily focused on cost benefits, creating opportunities for managed service providers (MSPs) through outsourcing.
“WA is a much smaller city compared to others so, getting talent can be an issue,” Gilson said. “Because of the economic down turn, people have been made redundant.
A lot of our graduates are also not looking at qualifications in IT, so it makes it more challenging.
“Because a lot of companies here can’t invest in their own resources, they need to look at other people doing it for them. Organisations that want to remove the cost of people internally within their organisations and give that to partners, that’s an opening in the market for us.”
To generate cost savings, Gilson said customers must assess wider business benefits and begin outside of the traditional box.
“For businesses in WA, you’ve got to think disruptively,” he said. “To be different in this marketplace, you’ve got to have a very different value proposition to customers.
“That involves the type of vendors that you work with, the type of services that you provide, and it also means that when you look at recommending solutions and delivering on them, you can rapidly mobilise them for customers to take advantage of.”
Naturally, Cirrus Networks still considers the mining and resources sector — including oil and gas — as a large part of the business. But in line with the slowing down of the industry, Gilson said partners are turning attention to other verticals and other states for new business opportunities.
For Gilson, the recent acquisitions of Amcom L7 solutions and NGage Technology Group has expanded the company’s reach outside of WA, into Canberra and Melbourne markets.
“In WA, the resources sector is slowing down but in other states, industries such as finance, agriculture, and other verticals are continuing to grow,” he said. “If we’re going to be able to provide value and offer value to customers, we’ve got to think very differently about how we’re going to do that.
“It’s very much around how we can provide solutions and services related to that for them to capitalise on value.” Looking back, rather than forward, WA enjoyed exceptional growth at a rapid rate, propelling the state into new levels of prosperity and progression.
This was a state riding the crest of the wave. Until recently however, with the mining boom over and gloom covering the otherwise sunny western skies.
But WA is not suffering a bust, with technology capable of providing a fresh pipeline for future growth.
“There are opportunities in the WA market,” Elliott added. “It just depends on where and how you look.”
