Gen-i punches above its own weight

Growing from strength to strength, Gen-i was once a reseller and has emerged as an ICT integrator in its own right. Rhoda Holmes, general manager for Gen-i Australasia, has played an instrumental role in the development of the company and her enthusiasm for the industry is clearly evident.

With a small but continuously growing Australian base, Gen-i works closely with key big name partners such as Cisco, Microsoft and Sun.

Part of the Telecoms New Zealand Group, the company employs 300 people locally to run its Australian operation. Holmes explains that the company was originally set up as the amalgamation of two separate entities.

“One was the team of people who support our largest client – the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The second was when Telecoms New Zealand bought Gen-i New Zealand as well as Gen-i Australia. At the time the company was tiny with about 40 people back in 2004. We put the two entities together to target big second tier enterprise customers, so not the biggest customers but the ones that would probably not be in the sights of Telstra or Optus for their telecommunications services,” said Holmes.

Offering an end-to-end service, the company can provide managed telecommunications services, managed IT services, unified communications, applications deployment and virtualisation as well as information management services by working closely with vendor partners.

From reseller to ICT provider
“
When we first came to Australia with the Telecom New Zealand group we won the Commonwealth Bank’s business and we didn’t have any telecommunications or IT presence here. That was way back in 2000 and it was a pretty amazing win. What we did was bring together other people’s services and that is where the reseller label comes from.

“We literally provided services over Telstra’s network or Vodafone’s mobile network, so we were seen as a reseller of their services as opposed to an entity in our own right, but that has changed significantly,” explained Holmes.

The company bought AAPT to establish a network presence and merged with the Powertel in 2007. The move significantly shifted the value Gen-i can offer as it can now provide telephony services to 60 percent of business customers on its own network as opposed to using another provider.

“When you resell other people’s services, what you have to work out all the time is why wouldn’t they just go to the others direct? I think the legacy from that is a huge focus on service management and a huge focus on the individual client needs and how you provide the service or fix the faults that is a value-add compared to going direct with one of the big players.”

Last year the decision was made to concentrate on the six partners that Gen-i worked with the most – Microsoft, Nortel, Sun, Citrix, Genesis and Cisco. Holmes explained that Gen-i focuses on going to its customers jointly with partners to present ideas
and services.

“We shared the list of clients we were both in and talked with clients about what we were doing for them. This is going really well, we have done joint partner breakfasts with Microsoft, joint technology briefings with Cisco and we are getting a lot closer technology- wise with those partners. They help us punch above our weight basically because we are a small, small player here, but if you walk into an enterprise customer and you have got a Microsoft, a Cisco or a Citrix besides you it gives you some global recognition for what you do,” said Holmes.

“We are quite small, with a small Australian presence and revenues just short of $200 million. It is sizable for where we started although we decided we couldn’t partner with everybody. We looked at the number of partners and we had something like 35 partners that do various things for us, with various customers. The downside of that is your partners don’t make you feel very special and you end up not giving any of them the time and attention,” said Holmes.

Gen-i’s main areas of interest locally include the Australian operations of longstanding customers of New Zealand Telecom such as banks, insurance companies and building corporations. On the back of its experience with these clients, Gen-i targets the banking and finance verticals.

“We have a huge range of customers and a lot of expertise in the areas of banking and finance around what affects their business.
We have spent a lot of time building customer value propositions around the things they are worried about. Another focus for us is the firms that aren’t quite loved enough by the other big players in Australia – under the radar I call them. We will never be huge, but we will always be focused on making sure our customers come back for more. Our view is if you get a little business you can grow from that as it is easier than growing from new customers.”
Looking to the future

With new business deals totalling more than $100 million already racked up for this year, it’s easy to see that the company is bounding from strength to strength – but what next?

“The partnerships will stay put next year, but we also plan to expand our own. We are looking at two ways of doing that. We are growing quite considerably organically, so we have added extra people in Australia during the last nine months. They have all been targeted on growing those new customer revenues with our partners. That will continue and we will invest quite heavily in our organic growth, but we are always looking for inorganic growth options. The IT market in particular in Australia is very dissipated, with lots of little players and lots of niches. We are always looking at whether one of those companies would give us a step up, let’s say with our banking and finance clients, or an extra capability that our clients are looking for. We’ve always got our eyes open for that,” she said.

Taking various angles to growing its presence within the Australian market, Gen-i is focusing on raising its brand awareness. Expect to see an increase in jointly branded conferences, breakfasts and technology shows with its six key clients.

Focused on their target market, the ICT integrator is not seeking an Australia-wide name and is using targeted customer approaches. Bringing together banking and finance customers or speaking at events such as the banking and finance annual technology conference will help Gen-i appeal to its targeted demographic.

Wealth of experience

Starting her career in the Scottish health service, Holmes left to join British Telecom in 1988 and stayed with the company for an impressive 17 years. “I got a job with British Telecom in training and quality management and my client group were engineers and they said why don’t I get a proper job? So I went and trained as an engineering manager, basically up poles and down holes, fixing faults and providing client service,” laughed Holmes.

From there she went on to run the commercial team with the construction engineers and learnt skills in business planning and marketing.

At 33, Holmes decided to go back to school and earn a qualification in telecommunications engineering and management. “After I finished that I asked BT if I could go and work for them internationally and they sent me to Clear Communications in New Zealand. Within a year BT decided it was going to sell Clear, so I left BT which was sad as I’d been with them for
17 years. I then worked at a pay TV company in New Zealand, but then Telstra bought that so I moved to Telecom NZ,” said Holmes.

From there she was asked to cross the water to Australia and led the charge in winning back the Commonwealth Bank business when there was only a year left in the five-year contract. Holmes successfully resecured that business in September 2005 for an
additional three-and-a-half years.

That was the beginning of her career with Gen-i that would see her quickly move up the ranks to the position of general manager for Australasia.