Scaling a sales summit atop Splunk and AWS

Customer anxiety over spending has been a double-edged sword for Sydney technology and professional services firm, Katana1 (K1), which ranked second in last year’s CRN Fast50. Director Nick Russell says K1 has had to fight for deals in 2014, but the tight conditions have also led to innovation that has set it up for growth.

“The economy is tough – or at least clients believe it is tough, which is affecting spending,” Russell says. “But it is helping drive more Amazon Web Services conversations and clients want more from their data, which helps our data analytics and business intelligence conversations.

“AWS, along with Splunk, has been key to driving our growth in professional services,” he says.

Russell is on a mission to be Splunk’s peak Australian partner. Collaborating with Datalicious, Katana1 recently took silver at the analytics vendor’s Asia-Pacific summit in China for a single customer view application running on its Splunk-as-a-service, which is built on AWS.

Russell has had success meshing upstart vendors with industry heavyweights such as NetApp, where he was a salesman before founding Katana1 – and the storage provider’s offerings are still half the firm’s revenue. But this fortuitous history is now augmenting and accelerating customers’ journeys into the cloud, he says.

K1 has formed another joint venture offering NetApp as a service for government, which Russell says will have huge potential and will be a key part of the company’s growth next financial year.

The mix of NetApp and AWS led to a $2 million deal that replaced Dimension Data at a big financial services institution. “It was our first substantial implementation of our disk-to-disk-to-cloud offering. NetApp was the largest component of the deal but it also included substantial Riverbed Whitewater and professional services.”

Russell says the client was swayed to the SteelStore (formerly Whitewater) cloud storage appliance – key for moving data to Glacier – because “the team presented the complete offering rather than a series of technologies”.

And while he doesn’t expect to replicate the same trebling in revenue growth this year coming off a larger base, Russell says Katana1 is tracking strongly for absolute growth backed by a doubling of professional services. Since last year’s Fast50, the firm now stands at 11 employees, having hired three more sales staff, a couple of Splunk specialists, promoted a professional services manager and may add a couple more employees this year.

“Our utilisation and margins are stronger as well. We worked hard on our reoccurring revenue and traditional sales, which has been great for profitability, [and] our gross margins and net profits are up.”

Customers are also maturing. “We have seen a real shift from customers asking us about cloud, to customers asking us specifically about AWS.”