No.9: onPlatinum ICT, 2016 CRN Fast50

While some start by offering technology to all-comers, onPlatinum’s founders Jay Newcomb and Shannon Overs built a bespoke vertical solution and energised it with a novel channel play of their own.

The Robina, Gold Coast technology services provider that started providing cloud to financial services customers and grew 117 percent last year to $3.79 million has added expertise in practice areas of creative design and digital marketing. Today, onPlatinum has a portfolio of 13 technology areas, such as managed IT, phone systems and backup and disaster recovery, alongside digital business solutions including branding, social media and email marketing.

“We started almost out of adversity in the financial services and accounting space. We were looking at marketing strategies to help traditional financial planners and accountants gain business,” says Overs.

A big issue for financial services is how they communicate within themselves and with their customers. “Financial services companies are good at delivering their services but not at finding new clients,” says Overs.

The reseller has built a hosted desktop environment from VMware, Microsoft and Intel stacks to meet its customers’ particular governance and data sovereignty requirements, hosted at NextDC data centres (gonged 2016 new partner of the year).

“Dealing with vendors and suppliers, your expectations often don’t get met 100 percent so we decided to build from the ground up, create a foundation and own everything we sell,” says Overs.

In the four years since its inception, onPlatinum has gained 300 active contracts and 2000 users on cloud and hosted-voice platforms.

“We provide IT-as-a-service, you don’t just pay for compute by the hour, you outsource your IT department to us. We manage everything, from end-user support to infrastructure, procurement and compliance for your licensing,” says Overs.

Its homegrown approach extends to onPlatinum’s latest offering, a bespoke video conferencing solution. Both parties on a call need the same end-point devices, but onPlatinum is working to broaden its use.

While they’re on the way to conquering Queensland’s financial services industry, Newcomb and Overs aren’t finished yet. They are keen to transform their own business model to attract their customers’ customers; in effect, creating their own services referral sales channel.

“The accountants’ clients are already dealing with companies like ours for their IT managed services. If we can leverage our history and engagement with the accounting industry we can deliver a referral program,” says Newcomb.

Newcomb says this is where onPlatinum will spread its wings into “cradle to the grave” sectors, boasting customers from one of Australia’s leading childcare centre providers to a 125-year-old funeral director.

“There are segments of our industry that can’t or won’t do what we do so we think we’re specialists in our field. There’s a lot of end users who don’t want to deal with five or six providers; they’re looking to streamline and we’ll do that through our trusted [channel],” he says.   

Pictured above: Shannon Overs and Jay Newcomb, OnPlatinum

FAST FACTS

Founded  2012
Key executives  Jay Newcomb (sales director), Shannon Overs (chief information officer)
HQ  Robina, Gold Coast, Qld
Growth  116.94%
2016 revenue  $3.789m
Top vendors  AWS, Microsoft