ARN

Australian partners outline immediate customer priorities, focus on opportunities ahead

This interactive virtual roundtable series housed viewpoints from leading partners across Australia

Partner success in the months ahead will be dependent on state, sector and solution, as the channel carves out new pockets of customer opportunity across Australia.

Amid a rebuilding phase at end-user level, technology providers are stepping up nationwide to help businesses overcome rising challenges related to remote working, cash flow and customer experience.

Central to such efforts will be the deployment of security, SD-WAN, collaboration and cloud technologies, underpinned by a revamped digital transformation agenda.

That’s according to Advance findings, a newly launched ARN virtual roundtable series housing leading partners throughout Australia.

During the launch session, featured providers included Thomas Duryea Logicalis; Calvert Technologies; ASI Solutions; Infront Systems and Oreta, alongside Somerville GroupDigital Armour; MSS IT; Area9 IT Solutions and Secure Agility. Representation spanned New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Launched in early August, Advance is a centralised editorial resource designed to help partners access forward-looking content as the Australian market attempts to reposition for growth. Delivered on-demand, the platform facilitates channel collaboration through access to real-time, relevant and local analysis, complemented by virtual events and research.

Despite ongoing Covid-19 challenges – triggered by the uncertainty of lockdown measures, government stimulus packages and customer budgets – partners are seeking to move the conversation forward to focus on short- to medium-term priorities.

Hence Advance, launched with the aim of helping partners search for pockets of opportunity – and revenue – in the months ahead.

“There’s no playbook for this, we’ve never been through this before,” acknowledged Simon Watt, director of Area9. “From a planning perspective it’s difficult to know what to expect but like most organisations, when you’re under attack the tendency is to circle the wagons and take a more defensive approach with respect to the business.”

Speaking via video link from Winnellie - a northern suburb of Darwin in the Northern Territory - Watt cited the words of Mark Hurd as a message of encouragement for a channel battered and bruised by Covid-19, outlining that ‘great companies excel in tough times’.

Such a quote from the former CEO of HP and Oracle - who passed away in October 2019 - is completed by ‘and in tough times customers turn to great companies’ - emphasising the potential ahead for partners aligned to customer priorities.

“This may or may not be accurate but it’s certainly a good mantra to hold on to right now,” Watt added. “In order to position the business for when economic conditions improve, we’ll be aligning more closely with our customer needs through innovation, talent acquisition and building out our service portfolio.”

State of the nation

In assessing the state of play across the Northern Territory, Watt observed that sectors showing signs of recovery are those currently being underwritten by government stimulus or funding.

“Sectors highly dependent on tourism and hospitality are definitely lagging behind but are showing blades of grass as restrictions lift,” he said. “We’re expecting investment to be subdued during the next couple of quarters due to the consumption of expenditure diverted from future projects to address the urgent business continuity activity resulting from the lockdown.

“Constraints brought about as a result of border controls have also slowed many IT projects, particularly in government, while the commercial sector is mostly still on hold.”

Heading across the border - south-west more than 2600km as the crow flies from Darwin to Perth - the market in Western Australia is currently delivering on the surge in budget spend issued prior to the end of financial year on June 30.

“We experienced stronger sales figures than in recent years for the same period because projects had been stagnant from March to May,” outlined Kelly Webb, director of MSS IT, based in Perth. “Customers are now realigning budgets which were pencilled in last year and figuring out how to make extra provisions for investment in security.

“IT projects are also backed up which is having a knock-on effect on projects that should have been started four months ago but we’re not seeing very much in the way of cancellations at this stage.”

Meanwhile in South Australia, Dean Calvert - CEO of Adelaide-based Calvert Technologies - acknowledged that as Covid-19 cases improved across the state, customer confidence and investment increased in parallel.

“Not to the degree we would normally experience around the end of financial year period however,” he qualified. “Now the virus has picked up again on the east coast we’re finding that customers are still improving in terms of positivity, but are keeping a watchful eye on developments. It’s almost a case of ‘strike while the iron is hot’.

“Most projects that we had scheduled are continuing because they were identified as important strategic works. We’ve still also got project work being signed off and booked in which is positive news for both us and our customers.”

Amid a second wave of Covid-19 cases and new lockdown measures in Victoria, Sachin Verma - managing director of Melbourne-based Oreta - is operating on the frontline meeting current IT project delivery obligations at a national level, ensuring that deployments are completed on time and to budget.

“IT delivery is continuing with a focus on customers delivering essential services, especially around network and security,” he said. “We anticipate that the IT industry will shrink before it experiences a ‘swoop’ recovery, with investment in data centre systems set to decelerate.

“However, the market for infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS] will grow, as will demand for SD-WAN. Customers will continue to re-evaluate IT strategies and cost savings for some time to come, particularly as the actual impact of Covid-19 becomes apparent.

“As they do, managed services will become more of a prerequisite and we don’t envisage customers returning to normal spending patterns until late 2021-2022.”

In echoing Verma’s observations, Sydney-based Michael Chanter - CEO of Thomas Duryea Logicalis - warned against an immediate return to normality - “not at least 2019 normality, any time soon”.

“The reality is that customer investment patterns have changed, and probably won’t alter for the long-term,” he documented. “At the start of the pandemic, there was a strong shift towards tactical spending on remote working technologies to get staff set up to work from home. The other structural shift is to cloud, and public cloud in particular.

“Customers are divesting themselves of large data centre footprints and physical workplaces, and it’s likely that this shift is permanent. These were existing trends, but Covid-19 appears to have accelerated this motion.”

While technology as a sector is well placed compared to others, Chanter accepted that “all ships will rise and fall” with the economy, with no business immune to such impact.

“I haven’t seen a return to normal from an investment point of view,” added Nathan Lowe, managing director of ASI Solutions, based in Sydney. “The shift to ‘normality’ won’t occur anytime soon while a risk exists of further Covid-19 waves and lockdowns across the country.

“IT project delivery has definitely slowed up as a result of challenges in the economy, but that depends on the industry. Hospitality and associated industries have all been significantly impacted whereas education, health and government continue to roll-out critical projects with most non-critical projects on hold.”

Delving deeper, Maria Padisetti - CEO of Sydney-based Digital Armour - agreed that a return to ‘normality’ is dependent on the sector, with retail and hospitality under significant strain.

“It will be a while before we see any normality there,” she accepted. “The spend has shifted to projects focused on going online. Sectors such as healthcare and aged-care have remained as they were pre-Covid. In fact, some have increased spending meaning we have not been significantly impacted as an organisation.”

Speaking as CEO of Secure Agility, Sydney-based David Abouhaidar outlined pockets of partner opportunity ahead however, insisting that the market is slowly showing signs of recovery.

“But we cannot set the market getting back to somewhat normal by at least February or March in 2021,” he qualified. “And even when the market does return, customers will be looking to do more with less because budget cuts are imminent.

"From a delivery perspective, we have had clients in certain verticals who have used the downtime to knuckle down on critical projects and we have also had clients put everything on hold or cancel due to uncertainty.”

Customer priorities: business

As outlined by Watt of Area9, a collective effort is underway across the business and government community to focus on recovery in the Northern Territory, specifically around rebounding the economy and developing job opportunities.

“Rebuilding is the priority,” he said. “A deep part of our identity in regional Australia is to rebuild. Major industry project investments appear to underline this to a great extent, such as in energy through renewable gas and hydrogen, to mining, resources, defence and infrastructure sectors.”

Embracing the ‘survive then thrive’ approach, Abouhaidar of Secure Agility said customer priorities are directly aligned to that of the channel - “ensuring we get through this with our whole team still on the park”.

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“This will eventually pass and when it does, we need to be prepared for a significant spike in activity,” he acknowledged. “Customers are also trying to survive the pandemic, with the main priority ensuring they have a secure and stable network to cater for the ‘new normal’ of remote working.”

Remote working continues to place high on the boardroom agenda across the entire ecosystem - spanning partners, distributors and vendors - heightening the need to find new ways to stay connected with customers.

“Whether in IT or retail, you have to find a way,” acknowledged Chanter of Thomas Duryea Logicalis. “Customers are our lifeblood and no business can afford to lose any. But we also have to ensure we maintain the fabric of the organisation and especially the culture as people become more dispersed.

“We’ve put in extra effort as a leadership team to ensure teams and individuals feel connected to our purpose and to each other. In the medium-term, we expect customers to focus hard on digital models for doing business whereas in the long-term, ‘how do I adapt to digital selling?’ will be the question.”

In the age of Covid-19 - amid mounting daily challenges - the age-old adage that 'cash is king' has never carried more significance not just for partners, but also customers.

“Customers are prioritising monitoring cash flow and strengthening cash reserves in the short-term, while increasing focus on cost efficiency and improving productivity, agility and customer experience,” outlined Lowe of ASI Solutions. “Businesses need to be dynamic during these times of uncertainty.”

Echoing Lowe’s observations, Padisetti of Digital Armour observed that organisations are continuing to review costs amid plans to “do more with less” during the months ahead. In the medium-term however, plans are in place to enhance efficiency, resiliency and profitability levels in areas such as supply chain, customer service and sales.

“This involves redirecting resources to customer facing roles in order to retain and serve existing customers, while growing their businesses in the new normal,” Padisetti added.

Maintaining the cash flow pressure sentiment, Verma of Oreta assessed that in the wake of Covid-19, challenges related to unpredictable revenue and operational changes will force businesses to embrace innovation, irrespective of circumstance.

“They will have to disrupt themselves to not only stay relevant but to survive,” he cautioned. “The shift to mass remote working has also resulted in increased security vulnerabilities, meaning customers will increasingly leverage managed services to ensure IT security and operations are looked after so they can focus on growing again.”

Likewise in Western Australia, and according to Webb of MSS IT, security and archiving continues to dominate the customer conversation, with a specific focus on backing up in relation to Office 365, alongside threat hunting services.

“Customers are prioritising the deployment of endpoint detection and response, including threat hunting, perimeter mail security and storage,” he said. “These are the hot topics we are currently engaging with customers on at the moment. In response we’re focusing our business on security vendors and architecting private and hybrid cloud solutions, allowing customers to pay via a consumption-based model.”

Customer priorities: technology

In the short-term, customer priorities remain anchored around security - confirmed Padisetti of Digital Armour - enforced further by the continuation of remote working into the second half of the year.

“Interest in compliance, managing risk, disaster recovery and business continuity is increasing,” she outlined. “In the medium-term however, we expect organisations to focus on technologies which involve automation, business process reengineering and analytics to better understand customers. We’re focusing less on the resale of products and more on helping customers succeed at a business level.”

In acknowledging the importance of strengthening cyber capabilities in South Australia, Calvert of Calvert Technologies said such customer focus is counterbalanced by a need to allow employees to return to remote working, should the need arise.

“Some have found non-VoIP phone systems to be a potential problem than first thought with more preference in switching to modern and VoIP capable systems,” he said. “This is alongside a spike in end point replacements due to existing devices not suiting the requirements of a rapid pivot to remote working. It’s almost as if the customer is finally listening to our advice.

“There’s no real change to our strategy - we continue to communicate regularly with our clients, providing advice through a ‘non-sales’ approach to reinforce that we are here to work with them, not just to sell to them.”

Due to the rising number of end-users accessing applications via public or private cloud, Abouhaidar of Secure Agility has reported an “immediate shift” towards SD-WAN, collaboration and security services.

“Therefore our strategy has not changed a great deal,” he added. “We have mainly prioritised cloud and managed services as we have made significant investments in this area. The pandemic has increased our focus further as this is where the customers are heading at an even quicker rate than before.”

The shift to SD-WAN - seemingly at speed and at scale - is motivated by a desire to increase agility, flexibility and visibility at the network level, supported by enhanced bandwidth. That’s according to Verma of Oreta, who documented an increasing need to keep traditional WAN and multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) running while transforming existing infrastructure.

“SD-WAN is becoming a key enabler, ticking all the boxes and addressing these challenges,” he advised. “Customers are seeking an integrated platform that can combine both network and security, especially with the recent influx of employees working from home.

“Customers now require improved visibility into network performance, allowing for immediate remedial action when detecting suspicious behaviour in real-time, without interfering with user experience.”

As a result, a growing trend is emerging in which customers are including SD-WAN on agenda items, allowing the business to respond in real-time to the current threat landscape.

“During the next 6-9 months, we will further position ourselves in the infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS] market,” Verma added. “We will continue to expand our focus on our networking capabilities, in particular SD-WAN, and highlight our MSP capabilities, through customer standardisation and optimisation.”

Amid the shift to remote working, Chanter of Thomas Duryea Logicalis forecast that the next wave of short- to medium-term adoption will centre around consolidating work practices.

“Customers are making investments to work efficiently and collaborate, while they may have started with an unsophisticated mode of virtual collaboration, most are now realising this may be a longer haul than we originally planned for, so are revisiting strategies,” he assessed.

Providing security requirements are adhered to, Chanter said collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams have combined to accelerate a shift from infrastructure to the cloud, removing barriers to entry around workload migration in the process.

“We’re continuing to invest in our strategic partnerships with Microsoft, Cisco and Dell Technologies among others,” he said. “We pride ourselves on exceptional vendor relationships and have robust go-to-market plans which align to our own objectives. We have secured our Azure Expert MSP certification with Microsoft for example, investing in skills and expertise to ensure we maintain and capitalise on our partnerships.”

For Lowe of ASI Solutions, customers are pushing through digital transformation activities in addition to remote working and security deployments, aligned to the belief that “customer-centricity” is the key.

“Our plans during the coming months will be both internal and customer focused,” he stated. “We will continue to focus on transformational strategies such as digital customer experience, streamlining operations and increased investment in employee training.”

Mirroring the rest of the market, businesses in the Northern Territory are now encountering a heightened awareness of vulnerability, providing opportunity for the channel to “step-up as an industry”.

“Bolstering systems to support the deployment of solutions very rapidly, developing digital tools that work in disrupted environments and supporting continuity is no doubt where most boardroom thinking will focus over the coming months,” Watt of Area9 said. “There’ll definitely be opportunity for adaptation of existing digital solutions and a focus on process automation.”