How a Fast50 firm is growing beyond services

Greg Sly says trust is at the heart of the CTO Group business model, so he’s noticeably relieved that he hasn’t led CRN astray. When we last spoke, the Canberra-based firm’s managing director made a prediction around its revenue targets – and they look to have nailed it.

“The 2014 financial year will see CTO Group revenues go through $9 million, which will be approximately 60 percent growth on the 2013 financial year,” says Sly. “With the turmoil and cutbacks associated with the federal election, this is certainly a fantastic result. I am lucky to have a wonderful and extremely capable group of people working in the company.”

It reflects another year of rapid growth from the company that ranked number five on last year’s CRN Fast50. Last year, Sly hinted at geographic expansion – and expand it has. Some 40 percent of its revenue is now coming from outside the nation’s capital, specifically from Sydney and Melbourne. CTO Group has established a ‘virtual office’ in Melbourne, while it has followed a major project to Sydney.

But while this financial year has been all about expansion outside of Canberra and growth of revenues, there has also been a consolidation – at least in terms of its core offering.

“We have narrowed our focus down to two core domains, associated with the data centre and associated with cloud,” says Sly. In particular, data centre migrations have offered a big chunk of business.

Sly nods to a number of projects, including “a multimillion-dollar engagement to conduct a complex data centre migration for a large international company” (he won’t reveal the name).

Other wins of note have included “a significant engagement with a government department to deliver a production application into the cloud”, as well as “numerous advisory engagements, specifically in the backup and storage space, [that] were conducted in large government departments as well as one of Australia’s largest financial institutions”.

Next year should see another milestone in the company’s business strategy. Unlike many CRN readers who find themselves running product-focused companies and trying to add service revenues, the opposite is true for CTO Group. Its $9 million or so

of revenue is purely services, “which is fairly significant compared with reselling tin,” says Sly.

For CTO Group’s next phase, he is mulling a move into solutions, specifically around data protection. “I don’t see CTO Group becoming a reseller per se, but I am looking for CTO Group to get involved with providing data protection solutions.”

He says the company is still “early in the research phase but I anticipate a significant part of our 2015 growth

to be in delivering solutions with a core focus on data protection solutions”.