Insentra's Ronnie Altit
Ronnie Altit, CEO of channel services provider Insentra, has revealed his ambition to see the company reach $110 million in revenue by 2024.
And so far, according to Altit, the company is well on the way to achieving that -- and has managed to globally trademark the term ‘partner obsessed’ in the process, so that the market has a clear understanding of his business strategy.
“It’s a realistic but aggressive goal,” Altit said. “We’re a 100 per cent channel-only professional and managed services provider. Our business model is really resonating well in the market because a lot of organisations are just not able to keep the bench that they need, and they don't want to use contractors.
“They want a trusted pair of hands with full time people that they know are going to be there tomorrow.”
Further, Altit noted the company is keen to partner with a few select international independent software vendors (ISVs), helping them launch in the Australian market.
He gave one example of working with application provisioning platform FSLogix, which was acquired by Microsoft last year.
“Our game is to bring excellent technology solutions to market in a way that the channel can use, without the risk of investment. We take the risk by investing in the skills and capability,” he said.
“The critical part is they need to form an overall part of our service offerings, so we’re taking a services led approach to bringing them to market. We’re not going down the path of being a distributor, we’re looking to sell services backed by good product. And that let’s us be those companies in-country, on an end-to-end basis where we can do the marketing, sales, all 100 per cent through the channel.
“A lot of the international young ISVs have fantastic tech, but if they have a dollar to invest, it will typically go towards the US or EMEA market, which are much larger and create a greater return on investment in that market,” he said.
Altit also revealed that a large and growing area of his business involves being able to help partners offer 24/7 customer support services.
“That’s been a real shift in where the market has started to leverage us, and further to that, you may have partners that want to take managed services to their client base, that either struggle to build those managed services because they may not have the full suite of what their clients are looking for, or can’t do 24/7 particularly well, which is a large growing area that our business is taking on,” he said.
Launching a ‘marketing as-a-service’ play is also on the cards, with Altit explaining it will take a specifically targeted approach towards its technical knowledge.
Currently, Insentra has more than 350 partners globally within its ranks and its headcount has also increased to more than 90 staff globally, and that continues to grow.
Recently, Insentra hired US-based Tim Hayden as its partner success leader in the Amercian market. He previously spent more than eight years at Citrix, and in Australia, Janet Michie joined the team as a partner development manager, who hailed from Tquila and Telstra.
“We’ll continue with our global growth strategy and adding the right partners into the mix,” he said.
“We enable partners to do more with their customer base than what they can do themselves, without the need to invest in the pre-sales, training, or vendor management.”
According to Altit, when the business first took off, its aim was to address the skills shortage in pre-sales and delivery, but over the years it has subsequently identified many more gaps that its business model addresses.
“What we've found is that rather than just augmenting organisations who don't have capacity, we're finding now that a lot of partners are coming to us to do things that they don't do," Altit said. "Some partners that are specialists in Microsoft Dynamics, but clients are wanting Azure or 365 work.
"Historically, they would have to walk away from that business, whereas by partnering with us, they’re now able to deliver the services they couldn’t do, without having to invest in their own team,” he said.
