Fast50: The road for the No.4 reseller led to China

Karl Redenbach has his head firmly in the cloud and come January he'll invite resellers to sign on to nSynergy Online Services, a collaboration and workflow software-as-a-service six years in the making.

The solutions provider, based on the Yarra River just the other side of the Melbourne CBD, pegged its success to a single vendor, Microsoft, and a philosophy that encompassed the value of people - wherever they were in the world. As an IT provider that models itself after a consultancy, Redenbach says people with initiative are the business' key assets.

NSynergy has offices in Australia's eastern mainland capitals including Canberra, a Shanghai support hub it established three years ago and a six-year-old European sales office in London. It also sells to the US.

Its early success was founded on a $1.1 million Federal Government research and development grant, with which it created LegalNet, based on ASP.NET and web services to connect in-house legal departments in real time over a secure connection with outside legal firms.

Today, nSynergy, which Redenbach founded with Peter Nguyen-Brown, takes lessons from that foray (20 percent of its business) and intellectual property it is patenting to fuel its move into new markets and opportunities such as cloud computing.

The Microsoft Gold-certified partner specialises in workflow and document management, intranets and portals, business intelligence and reporting using Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration platform. Its tool, myDocs, integrates the collaboration platform with Outlook and Word for big businesses and government.

Redenbach says it's working on a SharePoint solution for the Federal Department of Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy to help it manage "everything from committees to day-to-day documents internally".

"That's to oversee the National Broadband Network, so that's a big task." Redenbach, a former practising lawyer, says nSynergy prospered this year in part because its core competency was process re-engineering, popular with customers weathering the downturn, and because its costs were in line with the times.

He says nSynergy "practises what we preach, which is bizarre for a lot of IT businesses" by standardising its workflows, document management and process on the tools it develops for its customers. "It's very regimented and structured with how we deliver our business across the world." He says nSynergy's internal systems will migrate to the cloud in a year.

And although its Shanghai hub keeps nSynergy's costs under control, Redenbach is positioning it to become a bigger player in China to expand sales into the territory.

"A lot of people say to us, ‘You're really small, why are you overseas?'
"But small companies also need cost savings and it's probably more important for us than an ANZ [Bank]. It's a key reason for our success."

He says nSynergy "can do stuff that most of our competitors can't do because they don't have the infrastructure".

"We could have gone anywhere else in China and paid 30 percent less but we chose Shanghai because that's the financial and commercial hub of China and over the next five to 10 years we want to expand into China because that will be the biggest market for us."

The biggest change on the horizon is cloud services and Microsoft is positioned to beat Google at its own game, Redenbach says. nSynergy is building branded collaboration solutions that sit on top of Microsoft's software-as-a-service and Telstra's T-Suite managed infrastructure.

Early next year Redenbach will use Microsoft's infrastructure to launch nSynergy Online Services, its own cloud platform for resellers.

Redenbach says the service that will knit business workflows between departments such as human resources and accounting.

"Our main intention is to have a distribution channel for our nSynergy Online Services. We're looking at having a monthly fee not a large upfront cost [for resellers].

"There's a good opportunity for [other resellers] who want to grow their business [with our offering] and within 12 months we'll have all our own services in the cloud."