Rik Roberts (Inde Technology)
Inde Technology is on the hunt for a CEO as it rolls out a new integration and automation team and eyes growth at home and in Australia.
The Auckland based Microsoft, Aruba and Citrix partner has a new operating structure and is recruiting a CEO to deliver a “step-change” in growth, CTO Rik Roberts said.
Inde is also continuing to expand its portfolio, establishing an integration and automation team in answer to demand for software-as-a-service (SaaS) and legacy integration.
Roberts said Inde had grown up in the era of low code-no code and was on that front now effectively competing with some of the larger custom development shops.
Geographic expansion was also featuring. Of Inde’s over 70 staff, 12 were now in Wellington, up from just three six months ago. Business in Australia is also growing and Inde was looking at how to enter that market in a bigger way.
“Our security business has grown, picking up more and more customers and doing more, deeper security work from security operations centre and security incidents and response to doing due diligence assessments on acquisitions and SaaS adoption for large customers,” Roberts said.
Delivery management was also part of the mix now, with Inde overseeing customer projects or doing delivery itself.
Inde is also launching a strategic architecture team offering architect-level consultants with a broad range of experience in different IT disciplines but who still have the business understanding to be able to engage at the C-level or management layer.
That would help CIOs to think bigger picture, be pragmatic and get out of the weeds, Roberts said.
“We operate at that layer just below Deloitte and above the operational layer, a big picture view. We digest the key themes, streams and activities, actually taking the roadmap and making it tangible,” he said.
“We can say this piece of work here is going to be eight weeks long, it’s going to deliver this benefit to your business and be aligned with your end goals.”
With around NZ$30 million revenue, Inde is already working with and building roadmaps for billion-dollar NZX-listed and international companies, Roberts said.
One major win was becoming one of four companies leading lead the initial design phase of the NZ$1.47 billion new Dunedin hospital project.
On the security front, Roberts said, there was an argument that instead of trying to make the remote work environment more like the office, the office should be made more like the home.
An example would be removing a lot of private networking connectivity: don’t have a WAN or potentially an SDWAN and get rid of domain-joined devices and VPNs.
“If you can send your things across the internet using modern ways of managing [and securing] those devices, ... you just take away a whole bunch of problems and challenges and security risks,” he said.
“You don’t need to spend so much money managing those risks because you’ve removed those risks rather than mitigated them.”
The end result would be that everyone is working as if from home, even when they are in the office.
There had been some pushback there, but Roberts said it was entirely do-able using certificate-based authentication to, say, a published app in Azure to your environment with no private connectivity.
“It will take time for some of the bigger, more traditional organisations, but we have customers that have done it and others that are transitioning now,” he said.
User experience metrics was another area where change could be embraced, especially reducing the importance measuring closed tickets as a KPI.
“If we can remove the ticket entirely then we can get more proactive, change our focus away from that and look at the bigger picture,” Roberts said.
“That comes back to end user experience management," he said. "The sole purpose of an IT team within a company is to make sure that their staff can get access to applications and data.”
Measuring faults and issues logged does not measure and monitor satisfaction with applications and data while asking employees was subjective.
Effective end user experience management required measuring, for example, how long it took to open Excel, or to open a document, how long it took to save a document, to open the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, to log into it, to run a report and so on.
There were tools that could do that across all devices and all locations and means of connectivity.
If those measures changed due to an application upgrade or some other issue, the support team know immediately, without having to wait for users to lodge support tickets, which could take several days.
Unlike tickets, such tools could also point the service team to the root cause of the problem to speed remediation.
“That changes the service desk approach into a proactive conversation,” Roberts said.
