Vivek Trivedi (Exigo Tech)
Australia-headquartered IT services provider Exigo Tech has joined the ranks of local tech players choosing to expand their operations internationally amid the global pandemic, with the company setting up shop in Singapore.
The move comes after some prompting by Microsoft, one of Exigo Tech’s core vendor partners, although according to the company’s managing director Vivek Trivedi, the Asian market has always represented a tempting destination.
Indeed, Exigo Tech already has a support team in the Philippines and an office in India, so the Asian market is not an entirely new proposition to the company, hoverver Singapore offers some new opportunities for the company, according to Trivedi.
“We kept on hearing a lot of things from vendors like Microsoft, Telstra and organisations like that, asking ‘why are you not there? We really need a partner like you over there’,” Trivedi told ARN. “We were constantly thinking about ‘how do we take a step forward?’
“Finally, we got working with a couple of our clients that had branch offices in Singapore and we realised that it’s true, that top-notch quality of services that a multinational company’s looking for, we saw that as a great opportunity for Exigo Tech to be part of the competition there,” he added.
From Trivedi’s perspective, the company is taking root in Singapore at a time in which organisations operating in some of the surrounding countries are looking to relocate their regional headquarters to the city-state as they search for political and economic stability.
“Because it is a highly regulated country, very fair; it is a good democracy to go into,” Trevidi said. “So, we saw that alignment of Exigo Tech to be expanded that way. And we grabbed the opportunity, thinking: ‘if we are over there, [it is the] right time, right place, let’s take a risk and go into it’.”
The company has already taken on a handful of local talent to get things rolling in the region, with Trivedi and team expecting to have built its Singapore headcount out to at least 10 people by the end of its financial year, which wraps up on 30 June.
The burgeoning Singapore team will be supported by the broader branches of the organisation, which have been built up over the past several years, with technical experts and support teams in Sydney, India and the Philippines, as well as an office in Oman.
Moreover, given that the company received some promptings for a Singapore expansion from Microsoft, Exigo Tech is working to make its initial mark in the market solely as a Microsoft expert, with a potential expansion beyond the Microsoft stack further down the track.
“What we decided was that for the first year we will be focusing completely on the Microsoft stack,” Trivedi said. “We not only do Microsoft generic solutions like Office 365 and Microsoft 365, but we are quite [focused on] the high-end Azure cloud and...data science and data technologies.
“Exigo Tech is all about infrastructure, cloud and applications. These days, everything is interconnected. So as an end to end service provider, we wanted to make sure they [enterprises in Singapore] are given the right support, certain skills from India, certain skills from Philippines, and a range of skills in Australia, with the subject matter experts here,” he added.
Exigo Tech's Singapore expansion comes just a handful of months after Nextgen Distribution, also headquartered in Australia, decided to launch operations in Singapore as part of a broader effort to expand into the Asian market.
In August, the distributor revealed it had appointed former Tech Data Australia and New Zealand general country manager Wendy O’Keeffe as its new managing director of Asia, tasked with launching regional distribution operations from Singapore.
Under the role, O’Keeffe holds responsibility for building in-market capabilities from the ground up, relocating to the city-state to establish local teams across Southeast Asia and beyond ahead of an official market launch on 1 January 2021.
