Pernix expands Aussie presence through vendor and distie deals

Cully Cullinan - President of Pernix and Chairman of The Cullinan Group

Data warehousing specialist provider, Pernix, continues to expand across the Australian market, increasing its presence through a series of vendor and distributor deals.

In response to an accelerated growth spurt, the Adelaide-based business recently inked a partnership with Informatica, to be the data management solutions company’s partner across the South Australian region.  

As part of its push into the market, the company has also aligned itself with vendors such as Salesforce, ExtraHop, Adobe, Civica, Cisco, Yellowfin, ESRI, Xoomdata, and Tableau, and from a distribution standpoint, is now working with Avnet and Arrow ECS ANZ.

Pernix president and chairman of the Cullinan Group, Cully Cullinan, told ARN that the new deals have opened up market opportunities for the business.

“It adds very specific arrows to our quiver and is part of the armory we’re assembling so that we can play on a global market," he said. "We’ve stepped up one order of magnitude and we’re now accessing opportunities that are a result of these new partnerships."

According to Cullinan, Adelaide wasn’t so well represented by those brands, enabling Pernix to bring in such solutions to market at a local level.

"For us, the Adelaide market needs a specific strategy to break into," he observed. "The state has to reinvent itself and there’s a strong focus now on being digital first. As a member within the community, our role in that is to build business opportunities around that.

“As part of that strategy, we have brought on board international players to provide best of breed technologies. The market wants to consume outcomes and these businesses meet those demands."

Pernix director of sales and marketing, Aaron Reynolds, said the company is “very much open to partnering”, and has forged relations with other partners such as Nuago, a local born-in-the-cloud provider.

“We’ve traditionally been a services oriented business and haven’t had that many partnerships in place to support our end-to-end services, so we’ve gone on a recruitment drive to add more to the list," he said.

"We want to support next generation technology, digital transformation and business transformation."

Through its relationship with global firm, the Cullinan Group, Pernix’s expertise lies in enterprise transformation via a data-driven approach.

Specifically, its core capabilities are in data warehousing, business intelligence, big data advisory, data governance and mobile reporting.

Building on that, the company is also doing some work in the field of sport.

“We think there’s great opportunity to transform the sporting industry," Cullinan said. "It allows us to transform the way sport is and lets it adopt newer technologies like virtual reality, technologies for deeper fan engagement, new ways to look into a player’s career."

The business has built a sports analytics platform that analyses historical data, using this to shape talent acquisition alongside game outcomes. From a technology perspective, the solution is built on Amazon Web Services and utilises YellowFin for the portal and dashboards.

In addition, the platform also integrates with a number of sources such as Catapult Australia.

“Data is driving every organisation; at the heart of all businesses is the use of data," Reynolds said. "So, how you lay the foundations for such an environment helps you drive your business?

"The optimised use of data means you can transform and accelerate, and that’s what we’ve done in the sports vertical."

Reynolds said the company has also embarked on a few customer deployments with its vendor alliances - it is working with a sustainable agriculture company to integrate data sources into its greenhouse platform, utilising Informatica and AWS.

“This company received investment capital from a local government to build giant greenhouses to try and reduce its economic footprint," Reynolds explained. "The work we’re doing aims to help it automate, implement and integrate its business."

The company has also carried out an implementation of Tableau and Microsoft technologies - among others - for the Motor Accident Commission, who are in the process of creating a centralised road data safety system.

“It’s about how big data influences road safety," Reynolds explained. "Looking at things like crash attributes and weather patterns, and determining the possibility of crashes, the influences of crashes and how they respond.

“This will in the future integrate information and data sets across government into a repository where all Road Safety stakeholders can analyse and create dashboards and reports as well as undertake advanced modelling and then provide users with information to make better decisions."

Looking ahead, the company intends to work on its technology transformation piece that is currently in concept - this technology aims to re-engineer national defence assets, which Cullinan said will be “quite significant”.

"We’re taking on a more of a proactive role in transforming the market," he added. "The channel can expect more of that from us soon, along with approaching partnerships and the market differently."