The global resellers arrive

Australians’ tendency to be early adopters drove SerenTaaS CEO Glenn Cameron to our shores. “The Canadians are very slow in adopting cloud whereas the Australian market is very open to the concept – more than the Canadian and the US market.”

He says vendors and customers were behind the move. “We had a partnership with Zadara Storage and they had a global customer who was looking to expand into the Australian market. Zadara’s business model doesn’t expand outside the US so they asked if we were interested in looking at the Australian market. We had a quick look at it and saw it as a pretty good opportunity.

“Half of it is driven by an existing customer and vendors opening up opportunities for us, the other half is looking at the Australian market and saying it’s a pretty unique market when compared to the Canadian market, where we are headquartered.”

Ian Guest, head of marketing at Lync giant Modality Systems, says the company was also drawn to Australia by its clients. 

“We had operations going in Europe and North America for several years and we had quite a wide client base and because that was globally spread having operations in the APAC region in Australia, we decided the opportunity was great enough to move certain resources there.”

Having a strong vendor relationships should help overcome anxieties as the new kid on the block. “We are very closely aligned to Microsoft. We are one of the largest Microsoft Lync operations in the world. In terms of other vendors, really we try to be agnostic because one of our key values to customers is we have a good knowledge of a number of different vendor technologies that forms part of a wider solution.”

Born global, living local

Although there was a rush of names cropping up this year, Australia has long been a destination for international IT resellers. British-based Logicalis burst on to the Asia-Pacific market in 2009 when it bought Netstar Group for $21 million, adding to its offices in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and Peru, alongside its German and US businesses. It is owned by Datatec, the same group that owns distributor Westcon.

Logicalis Australia marketing director Oliver Descoeudre says its link to Cisco and a global reach puts it in a very strong position to service the market here.

“The advantage of the federated model is we have the autonomy to make decisions that reflect local customer requirements but we have the ability to draw on group tools and group skills where required,” Descoeudre says.

“Where we have a global deal we can go back to the UK and say, ‘What can be done for that, let’s replicate that’. It’s an advantage. We can do what we need to do but we have the ability to fall back and draw from the experience of a 4000 employee company where we≈need specific experience.

“And we are now seeing a lot of deals where we are working collaboratively with a UK or US developer, a common architecture or common solution and the customer is looking for that consistent delivery of services, far more now than four years ago.”

NTT Communications has been operating in Australia since 1987, originally to service Japanese multinationals connecting back home. After a few years, it was servicing Australian companies and Australian multinationals.

In 2011, it bought a 70 percent stake in Australian resellers Frontline Systems and Harbour MSP, which gave it a footprint in four Australian cities and a strong channel. Last year, it consolidated under NTT Communications ICT Solutions.

“It fitted in with our strategy of global network services, data centre services and infrastructure-as-a-service offering,” says director of NSW sales Michael Fortescue. “Having Frontline and all their capabilities was a very good complement and gave us a footprint right here in Australia in terms of offices and customer footprint. We work with all the major vendors including HP – we are their largest partner in Australia – Microsoft and Hitachi Data Systems.”

What was the attraction to Australia, a tiny market by global standards?  “We identified Australia as being one of the strongest growth markets in the Asia Pacific apart from India and China,” Fortescue said. “One of the drivers is that the world is looking to globalise and Australian multinationals are looking for strong providers to take them on the journey to build up operations in other geographies. NTT is very well positioned to help them achieve that because of our local resources, local billing and we can decode the complexities of doing business in Asia, the US and Europe.”

Fortescue concedes that entering and succeeding in a new market isn’t easy. It helps to have kind of backing the company gets from NTT. “One key differentiator for us is we have a $3.5 billion development arm so we have very deep pockets in terms of R&D and we continue to invest in awesome technology.”

While some global resellers might face challenges coming into the Australian market, for many the potential upside is too good to miss. NTT won’t be the last multinational with deep pockets to try to strike gold in the lucky country. 

Local resellers cannot afford to get complacent.