Disruptive reseller has Fast50 top 10 in its sights

For 2015, BEarena managing director Darren Ashley has a few New Year’s resolutions. For starters, the Fast50 company, which clocked in 79.2 percent revenue growth in the 2014 Fast50 list, aims to get into the top 10 for 2015.

“We got pretty close to 100 percent year-on-year growth last year and we’re looking to do the same this year,” Ashley said. “There’s a few things we’re bringing to market this year to achieve that.”

Ashley said the solution sell for a BEarena new customer often starts with a point product to meet an immediate, tactical business problem. Over the course of a year or more, as the point product proves itself, the customer comes back for more. That makes for a slow burn that Ashley expects to spark a wildfire of revenue in the current financial year and beyond.

Also leading revenue growth was the October tie-up with virtualisation vendor VMware for virtualised desktop infrastructure, Ashley said. “We have that infrastructure operational and a number of customers engaged in pilots so we’ll see explosive growth in that infrastructure as well,” he said.

Ashley said BEarena is working on a couple of implementations each in the range of “thousands of seats”, but he also expects to see strong demand from SMBs and smaller mid-market customers looking to roll out VDI solutions for 200 seats. “They will be compelling because they’re very different to what other people are doing in the market and difficult to emulate” for the price.

“We know that there’s a lot of interest in desktop-as-a-service and BYOD, but they tend to be long sales cycles and they don’t get to production for any number of reasons. We’re taking away hurdles that have stopped it in the past,” he said. 

“The reason why it’s 200 people is it’s difficult to get a solid user experience at that point because a lot of infrastructure is involved. We’ll be able to offer a similar service [to that found in bigger deploy-ments] but allow them to grow into it.”

Once onboard, customers will scale their needs through BEarena’s portal. Ashley sees interest across all verticals but especially in education. He doesn’t anticipate competition from Amazon Web Services’ Workspaces.

“We’re more niche and it won’t be for everyone, but so far the people we’ve spoken to and the customers we’ve socialised the concept with have given us good feedback.”

He also said that software-defined networking is starting to gain a head of steam in the data centre and he soon plans to announce a customer signed late last year: “That will show a great deal of faith in that vertical and open people’s eyes about what can be achieved with that technology.”

Ashley said that BEarena is about “six months ahead of the market” with its disruptive converged infrastructure vendor, Nutanix.

“All of our virtual desktops run on Nutanix so that will also roll over into our environment to allow us to place desktops wherever we want to – in a public cloud provider or in the customer’s own facility or hosted with us,” he said.