Fronde is finding plenty of blue sky in cloud

Don McLean has two New Year’s resolutions coming into 2015. He’s on a fitness kick in his personal life, but when it comes to business strategy, he expects to beef things up not trim down.

The Australian boss of the cloud and IT integrator tells CRN: “I’ve just started  jiu jitsu lessons with my 15-year-old daughter and it’s almost killing me as a 48 year old. My resolution for Fronde is to capitalise on the success of last year – we’ve doubled the size of the business – and we’re going to do that by evangelising the cloud.”

In last year’s CRN Fast50, Fronde Australia turned over $5.6 million with 71.9 percent annual growth. If anyone can ensure even further revenue growth on the back of cloud evangelising, it’s McLean. He has experience going back to the dawn of cloud computing in this country; Fronde acquired his cloud start-up OnlineOne in May 2013. 

Prior to OnlineOne being founded in 2006, McLean was a director of one of Australia’s first accounting software application service providers, NetReturn, established by his brother, Stuart (now Xero’s chief revenue officer).

“We’ve traditionally worked in the small end of the market but we’re now growing into the enterprise,” he says.

Partnerships with NetSuite and Amazon Web Services will speed Fronde’s growth, he says. For instance, Amazon’s platform underpins the Fronde Cloud Workspace, its desktop-as-a-service solution, which ties AWS with Citrix and Google technology. Fronde Cloud Workspace brings traditional applications into the cloud and enables employees to use online collaboration tools such as Google’s.

Business is “booming”, says McLean. “The whole cloud sector is growing faster than average. We’re seeing a lot of interest in the Fronde Workplace product. The ‘app-ification’ of moving stuff from the desktop to the cloud and accessing from any device.”

Although he sees the prices of cloud services continuing to fall – especially in spot markets – channel providers such as Fronde will continue to prosper because “we provide value by understanding the customer”, he says.

“You go above the software,” he says. “You need people who understand software to implement it and who also know business and change management, and that’s where the absolute value is.”

Fronde counts Telstra subsidiary O2 Networks and broadcaster SBS among its clients. It’s also seeing greater traction for Google’s Chrome operating system and expects to make further announcements soon.

But the business isn’t ignoring its core. Over the Christmas break, while most of us were unwrapping presents and getting indigestion, Fronde boosted its number of NetSuite ERP-certified professionals from two to eight – the greatest number in an Asia-Pacific partner, McLean believes. 

The certification covers topics such as cash flow management and inventory management.

“It’s a very onerous exam,” he says. “[In networking] Cisco certification was always held up as No.1 in the past, but NetSuite in the ERP marketplace is No.1.”