L-R: Andre Morgan, Fabio Carvana and Adam Durbin (CMD Solutions)
One of the grandest challenges for many businesses operating during the COVID-19 pandemic is focusing on recovery and growth.
Depending on the industry, businesses could be faring very differently. Online fintech companies have fared much better than travel and hospitality, so there will be very different challenges, according to CMD Solutions CEO Andre Morgan.
“Overall for organisations that have been able to weather the storm, they will face application modernisation challenges associated with personalisation, scaling and resilience,” Morgan said.
“There are significant opportunities for businesses that are prepared to modernise their technology environment by using cloud technology as an enabler to differentiate from their competitors.”
CMD, which was formed five years ago, takes its name from its three founders, Fabio Carvana (COO), Andre Morgan (CEO) and Adam Durbin (CTO), and is a specialist AWS Premier consulting partner.
Durbin and Morgan worked together at a consulting company called RXP, and Carvana was the national infrastructure manager at Southern Cross Austereo.
“All three of us agreed that the cloud was a game changer and that it was going to make customers think very differently,” Morgan said. “We felt there would be a great opportunity for a partner who was essentially cloud native and that customers would gravitate to an organisation who was not tied to legacy technologies and could help them leverage the full potential of the cloud.”
Fast forward to March 2019, and CMD grew to around 45 people and joined Mantel Group’s ‘house of brands’ strategy to provide a broader range of specialist services by collaborating with the other Mantel Group brands.
“We’ve continued to grow, after a pause during COVID-19, we now have 65 people in CMD and 280 people in the Group,” Morgan said.
In a nod to its efforts in the market, CMD took hold of the 2020 Amazon Web Services (AWS) APN Consulting Partner of the year for Australia and New Zealand.
Within the AWS fold, CMD covers DevOps, security, end user computing and migration competencies, all of which align with its specialist practices in cloud engineering, data, application transformation and migration.
In the next six months ahead, Morgan plans to continue to grow and help more clients fast-track their cloud adoption journey.
“We’re focused on continuous improvement both internally and externally, so will continue to improve each of our core practices and offer our clients a broader set of services by collaborating with Eliiza and DigIO to offer a greater level of end-to-end transformation,” he said.
“The focus on our core practices remains the same and has been structured based on the demand that we see from our clients. Since COVID-19, we have seen clients focus on migrations following business case assessments which I think is a shift to establishing a more operationally efficient and flexible IT landscape.”
Technology providers are in a unique position to be able to help businesses recover from the pandemic-related downturn, Morgan said, and within their own sphere, clients were pushing ahead with AWS migrations amid increased usage of AWS Digital Workplace services.
“As demand for various customer services increases, tech providers that understand how to use technology to help businesses provide better, more engaging services to their customers will be successful,” he said.
Morgan noted there was a strong focus on cost and ROI, highlighting the need to make sure it was achieving business objectives, therefore justifying the investment.
“We’re in a very challenging time - we’re in a recession and some sectors have been hit very hard. Overall, I think demand for specialist consultancies that can help grow revenue or achieve greater operational efficiency will continue to increase over the next 12-24 months.
“Some sectors will respond quickly and others will be feeling the impact for years to come.”
ARN Advance is a centralised editorial resource designed to help partners access forward-looking content as the Australian market attempts to reposition for growth.
