Anittel's Ilkka Tales talks to Leon Gettler

“Our product development guy is responsible for the whole value chain and making sure that we get a good mix of development across the business.”

At this stage most of the ideas seem to be coming from customers. They have particular requirement s needing to be addressed.

“Our customers are generating ideas, maybe because they have particular needs to be solved so we are quite focused on our customers and working through verticals and making sure we try to develop solutions for them,’’ he says. “That generates a fair amount of the ideas from an innovation perspective.”

“It’s market driven in terms of where we see the opportunity. It’s very much business case driven.

“Our challenge is making sure we are focused on the right ideas and services from an innovation perspective. We come up with an idea and do the business case. Then we go and do a test market to see whether it is taken up. The proof is always with the customers so we try to get that cycle of ideas happening as quickly as possible.

“Inevitably, not all ideas are good ideas and the proof always comes out of the customer engagement. And through that process you develop something that starts driving a bigger investment.”

As part of the process, he says, the company has also set up a wiki for its engineers. The wiki is aimed at helping them collaborate and create ideas for research and development.

There is a lot focus among engineers looking for solutions for customers or trying to address problems, he says. “It’s a collaboration site. They can foster ideas and find out who is interested, arriving at a particular solution across the organisation. So what we end up doing is building champions within the organisation.”

At this stage, the site can only be accessed by the engineers. But Tales expects it will eventually be made available for customers, allowing them to come in with their ideas. The investment is paying off. After doing eight acquisitions last year, Anittel took the top spot in the CRN Fast50 last year, making it the fastest growing reseller in the country. Tales says investing in research and development was a strategic decision to give Anittel a competitive advantage in a crowded market space.

“It’s the key for us, otherwise it’s just ‘me too’,’’ Tales says. “The challenge for the whole community of resellers is how to innovate in a market where revenues are high but the margins are low. How can we change the model to help us gain market share and by the same token be very different to what everyone else does?”