Products and services
We can dig deeper into the categories of products and services to better understand how the CRN Fast50 delivered such strong performances.
The biggest revenue drivers for the CRN Fast50 were managed services followed by professional services. In fact, our entrants told us that these two types of service offerings represented more than $400 million of total channel business, or more than 50 percent of the total turnover of this year’s group.
The biggest managed services provider, by far, was Perth’s Kinetic IT (No.26), which specialises in outsourcing and whose $179.8 million revenue heavily distorts the overall managed services number. Without Kinetic, professional services were the biggest money-spinner, with RXP Services (No.20), Revolution IT (No.44) and Araza (No.3) all particularly strong in this area.
‘Public cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service’ was the third largest category in terms of revenue, with entrants claiming to have driven more than $50 million of public cloud and IaaS business. However, the major contributor to this segment was publicly listed Bulletproof Group (No.16), which celebrates its third CRN Fast50 appearance this year. The $47.2 million-turnover company, which gets 80 percent of its revenue from public cloud and the rest from services, is one of the premier local Amazon Web Services partners, and is also increasing its focus on the Microsoft cloud.
None of the other providers came close to driving so much revenue from public cloud. VMtech (No.33), which last year won the CRN Fast50 Editors Award, did about $3 million in public cloud/IaaS, as did Blue Apache (No.35). Cloud Plus (No.25) and VentraIP (No.28) rounded out the top five in terms of public cloud/IaaS revenue.
Software development was a significant part of the mix this year, thanks to RXP Services, Outware Mobile (No.48) and first-timer Glintech (No.41). Brisbane-based Glintech turned over just shy of $12 million in the 2016 financial year, growing off the back of its position as a leading Atlassian partner and solid revenues from IBM.
This year’s fastest-growing company, The Missing Link Security, drove the largest information security revenues of any company. The rest of the top five infosec providers were, in order of revenue, VMtech, SecureWare (No.23), Enosys (No.19), and Cloud Plus.
New South Wales-based companies LBNCo (No.40), did the majority of its revenue in carrier services, as did Telegate (No.17), in its fourth CRN Fast50 appearance.
Customer segments
The largest chunk of CRN Fast50 revenue came from enterprise and government customers – no surprise, really, given the bigger budgets and larger projects involved.
In general, smaller providers leant more toward the consumer, SMB and midmarket, while the larger companies did more enterprise and government work. But that wasn’t a hard and fast rule. Of the five largest companies this year, BigAir (No.50) and Bulletproof Group (No.16) claimed their largest share of revenue from the 50-1000 seat midmarket sector. Kinetic IT (No.26) is a government specialist, while RXP Services (No.20) got 80 percent of its revenue from the customers over 1000 seats.
At the other end of the scale, first-timer Strut Digital (No.21), turned over $3.6 million but did the majority of its business in the enterprise sector. Sydney-based Strut is an Amazon Web Services-focused channel partner, and was the first Australian partner to win a customer to AWS’ 80-terabyte physical data migration device, Snowball – migrating Bauer Media data to S3.
The same small-meets-big theme applies to $5.7 million-turnover 1ICT (No.39), which also got 80 percent of its business from enterprise customers. Brisbane-based 1ICT, which claims Apple and Microsoft as its biggest vendors, has secured some big-name customers in the year, including Domino’s Pizza, Goodstart Early Learning and Navman GPS devices.
Vendors
The question we always want to understand is, which vendors’ solutions drove the best results? We asked all entrants to provide details on their closest vendor partners, and how much each company represented in revenue.
This data is intended as a guide only; some entrants provided granular details of even their smallest partners, while others only submitted their largest vendors. Some listed no vendors at all, which perhaps shows how many companies in the channel now see themselves as pure‑play service providers.
However, slicing the data does raise some interesting trends. This year, infrastructure vendors featured heavily among the CRN Fast50 than in 2015, no surprise given that hardware revenues were also higher than last year.
Despite many in the channel embracing cloud, hardware is still prominent. For the high-revenue traditional players, namely Dell, Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, overall revenue came from a bevy of partners. They were the three most popular infrastructure vendors to work with. Over a dozen providers on this year’s CRN Fast50 marked Microsoft as an important vendor, making it the single most popular company for our CRN Fast50.
The high revenues generated by newer entrants to the market, such as Pure Storage, FireEye and Palo Alto Networks, was largely down to a small number of specialist partners. Almost all of Pure Storage’s revenue was driven by NGage Technology Group (No.10); most of FireEye’s sales came from The Missing Link Security (No.1) and the bulk of Palo Alto Networks’ revenue was generated by Enosys (No.19) and SecureWare (No.23), both told us that the security vendor was their most important partner.
Two IT firms, Katana1 (No.7) and VMtech (No.33), drove NetApp, each doing more than $5 million of business with the storage firm.
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