Redback Technologies
FOUNDED – 2015
HEADCOUNT – 52
KEY TECH – Internet of Things, smartphone apps
KEY VENDORS – Microsoft
KEY CUSTOMERS – 600+
Redback Technologies’ journey began with a question: How can we combine software smarts and hardware to deliver a reasonable ROI on a solar energy storage system?
The result of this research question was the development of a Microsoft software driven energy storage solution that captures, stores and manages solar energy.
The packaged system encompasses a smart solar inverter, battery enclosure and intelligent energy management software, designed to empower consumers to decide how they want to use, save and sell the energy captured from their solar panels via a smartphone app.
“It is a passion that has now become economically viable for the masses,” Redback Technologies founder and managing director, Philip Livingston, said.
Since launching in April 2015, the Brisbane-based start-up has grown its headcount from three to 52 staff and is expecting to grow to 70 by early October.
“When building this vision for us in the longer term you need to have access to education and to people, which is why we are growing our headcount significantly,” Livingston said.
“There are many functions that need to be built in beyond the glossy product in the market that is selling. We are working hard on capitalising the business to a degree that enables a long-term runway. We are also trying to blend our technology to serve other industry verticals, not just energy.”
KZN Group
FOUNDED – 2016
HEADCOUNT – Six
KEY TECH – Automation, security, DevOps, cloud
KEY VENDORS – Amazon Web Services
Perth-based KZN Group has hit the market running through a double entry into the Australian industry, with the launch of a managed services consultancy and security product simultaneously within 18 months.
“The plan was always to be 50/50 between being focused on our own products and consultancy for other products and customers,” KZN Group founder and managing director, Craig Nicol, said.
“The benefits are that we employ multi-skilled people. We want everyone to be strong on product and strong on consultancy.
“That provides employees variety and therefore job satisfaction, allowing them to identify new customer problems and then intellectual property (IP) we can potentially bring in-house and commercialise and productise.”
KZN Group's product, Insight, is a competitor to Splunk whereby it manages the monitoring and reporting on the security, compliance and performance of IT systems and business services, but on a consumption basis.
According to Nicol, Insight as a product is the later step of a “multi-faceted security journey” and consequently, stands tall as a mature product in the security market across Australia.
“Fundamentally, security is a journey with multiple steps,” he explained. “The service we offer sits somewhere on the second or third step. Through the engagements we were having with customers both large and small we found that many weren’t yet covering the basic steps required."
Nicol said vendor value alignment is fundamental to KZN, with the business only looking at other technology partners within the wider Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem.
“Puppet is talking to us currently and for us that goes hand-in-hand because it is orchestration, DevOps and automation,” he added.
