Gen-i punches above its own weight

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.

above collaboration geni its networking own punches weight