Mike Cunningham (TechConnect)
The ‘Partner Spotlight’ series explores partners operating in the local channel landscape right around the country, from Cape York to Hobart, Byron Bay to Fremantle and beyond. This edition focuses on Hope Island-based managed services provider (MSP) TechConnect.
Envisioning a business model is one thing, but putting the theory into practice doesn’t always work out. This isn’t always for the worse, however.
Starting in 2011, TechConnect begun its life on the Gold Coast, initially starting out with a follow-the-sun business model – offering support around the clock across time zones – for a specific client.
“We believed, and we were proven right, that we could run a follow-the-sun business from the Gold Coast and get the best of everything for our team, in terms of lifestyle,” said TechConnect founder and general manager Mike Cunningham.
While a follow-the-sun model might be most apt in the area referred to as the Sunshine State, starting up a business on the Gold Coast, rather than a more-populated capital city, came with its own breed of challenges.
One of which was the fact that it wasn’t based in a capital city. This, Cunningham claimed, somewhat pigeonholed the business, as it tried to conduct business nationally, but some customers viewed this as a difficulty.
Another aspect harming the business in its early days was its choice of location within the Gold Coast.
“Back in 2011, we used to work out of a small office and connectivity was an issue, even for mobiles. We even had to bring in a Telstra booster for our mobile signal,” Cunningham said
“Not that the issue of connectivity was a massive issue, but it also showed us early on that to succeed, we would need to overcome some challenges. We did that and we continue to do that by adopting an attitude of ‘can do’ and we considered nothing was insurmountable – that's reflected in taking on challenges like the follow-the-sun model.”
Two years later from its inception, TechConnect moved away from the follow-the-sun model, with the customer taking control of those particular services.
The silver lining
When one business model closes however, another one opens, with it providing “perhaps higher value” services to a gaming customer. This saw it partner closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and level up its skills in cloud adoption and data management.
That being said, TechConnect still provides services for the customer that moved away from the follow-the-sun model and it remains one of its largest clients.
Over time, TechConnect developed its AWS skills and became an Advanced Partner in late 2016, as well as earning the cloud giant’s competencies in data and analytics, which it achieved in 2020.
“With these competencies, there is a lot of investment required in terms of skills and resources, and AWS remains one of our most critical partnerships,” Cunningham added.
In addition to AWS, the MSP has also formed noteworthy partnerships within the channel with Weston-Comstor – the founder referring to it as “one of the most critical organisations we work with” – and Rhipe.
Past these, TechConnect has also developed informal relationships – which Cunningham is quick to add that they’re “increasingly becoming formalised” – with Gold Coast and South East Queensland-based universities, including Griffith University, Bond University, University of Queensland (UQ) and Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
“We also have strong relationships with and are part of the wider ecosystem of technology research and start-ups in the wider Gold Coast region,” he added.
“When we look back 11 years, this ecosystem simply wasn’t in existence and now it employs hundreds of clever, productive, entrepreneurial people. We would never claim we created this growing ecosystem, but we like to think we played some small part and we will continue to.”
Today, the veticals TechConnect finds itself strongest in include healthcare, agriculture, mining and resources as well as gaming.
“These are very diverse sectors but what they have in common is the need for digital transformation to improve and that’s largely around data management and gaining valuable insight,” Cunningham said.
“Despite a lot of hype about this problem already being solved, we find the majority of organisations around the world still struggle to find ways to derive actionable and valuable business insights from data to become more efficient and grow productivity.
“That’s actually still quite difficult, even when you now have the option to migrate large and mission critical workloads to the cloud. This challenge – which does hold significant benefit if done properly – applies to every industry I can think of.”
TechConnect’s work with healthcare in particular is something Cunningham finds to be gratifying.
“It’s rewarding to know you are making a difference to the health outcomes of people here on the Gold Coast by providing a part of the solution to intractable healthcare industry issues using the power of data,” he said.
One project that stands out in particular to Cunningham was TechConnect’s work with Southport, Queensland-based clinical data-as-a-service provider Datarwe, among other partners, to create a digital dashboard-based information systems to help nurses and medical staff gain access to patient information at their bedsides.
The two businesses have also worked together to create an acute-care bed dashboard in the Gold Coast University Hospital’s intensive care unit.
The past and the future
Looking back, Cunningham said starting off early in the game on data may have hindered it at first, while broadening itself into the “normal” IT provision market may have been more beneficial.
“We may have differentiated a little too early and we were ahead of the market in some ways,” he said.
“Then again, it helped us gain valuable insights into the market and the market is now absolutely focusing on how to optimise data at scale, so we like to think we have competitive advantage in that area. In a sense, the market has come to us.”
As for what the future holds, Cunningham said the business will continue to build out its data competence and built-in data migration and management services.
In addition, TechConnect is also looking at creating services to customers’ carbon emissions.
“Sustainability is very important for us and our customers, and, of course, for the planet,” Cunningham said.
“We are working on ways to provide customers with easy to access, simple, dashboard-based insights into how they can reduce their carbon emissions impact – this is particularly relevant to their cloud migrations. We believe cost reduction and carbon emissions reduction go hand in hand for cloud migration.”
In fact, TechConnect is already pursuing this, with it launching its sustainability warrior segment of its Warrior Program managed service offering in June, which focuses on designing solutions that prioritise not resulting in a “major environmental impact”.
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