Barry Assaf (Nexon)
A focus on organic growth supported by strategic acquisitions is part of Nexon Asia Pacific’s aim in 2021 to strengthen its market position, offerings and capabilities.
Nexon co-founder and CEO Barry Assaf said the cloud and managed service provider was looking for acquisitions that specifically add to skills or geographic coverage in its key growth areas of cybersecurity, public cloud and business solutions.
“We’re seeking to increase our presence in Melbourne via acquisition as well as acquire talent to support our growth in specific product segments and industries,” Assaf said.
“Our approach when we make an acquisition is to look at the talent and the skills within that business and leverage that talent into our organisational structure across the company."
During 2020, the company achieved 13 per cent revenue growth, thousands of services under management and more than 200 staff across Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sydney and Melbourne. Acquisitions were also made in the form of GCOMM, Reimagine, XCentral and the security and tech services division of Kiandra IT.
“We're scaling fast and have more than doubled the size of the business in the past 12 months, which has given us the opportunity to further invest in the management team as well as customer services and support,” he said.
“For the first time we have hired a general manager of strategy and planning, invested in key people in the public cloud and cyber security spaces and appointed sales leaders to grow our presence in Victoria and across the public sector.”
Some of Nexon's standout customer deals include a multimillion-dollar agreement with investment firm Ord Minnett, a $3.5 million digital infrastructure contract with pest control company Flick Anticimex and a significant contract extension with financial services company IOOF.
This year, Nexon also marks 20 years in business with Assaf, who at the time entered the business frame with a background as a certified engineer with telecommunications sales and marketing experience, co-founding the company originally as a telecommunications provider.
Assaf said the key to Nexon’s success was in anticipating change, disruption and aligning the business to emerging trends.
“The need to work and interact with customers remotely has accelerated business investment in data security and migration to the public cloud. This has touched every solution and business line that we offer,” Assaf said.
“Cybersecurity has been hugely disruptive. Customers are more aware now of their vulnerabilities and they're looking to protect themselves. So, we've been extremely proactive with our investment in solutions and resources to meet the market demands.
“The adoption of public cloud services has increased demand for greater IT speed, agility and security. Collaboration and secure access to data and platforms by remote workers has shifted the market.”
Assaf pointed out that digital transformation was only going to gather pace as companies identify the range of benefits, from augmenting and automating client services and running their operations more efficiently to standardising collaboration tools to allow staff to work more productively while remote.
“We leveraged our voice and modern workplace expertise with Microsoft Cloud based solutions, which was timely for us because we've been offering these types of solutions for the past five years,” he said.
“Nexon’s Business Solutions division also increased in staff by more than 300 percent since 2019 to assist clients to automate, streamline and improve processes to support new ways of working.”
