Vox Pop: Was your most important vendor the same in 2015 as in 2014?

Owen Johnson, managing director, Comvision Australia

Yes, it was Dell. We see a lot of companies that want to implement new ERP systems. When they do, often they need infrastructure such as storage arrays, servers and networking and that’s where we drive a lot of business through Dell.

That expanded in 2015 because of our overall growth, which was nearly all organic. We moved on some of our underperforming clients and started shifting resources from break-fix to managed services.

Dell is now largely our go-to for desktops and laptops. We’ve been upgraded to one of their preferred status members, which is quite a big deal for us because it gives us a foot in the door with larger companies. Having that relationship with Dell and access to their marketing team and access to their technical team makes us a lot more than just another reseller.     

We’d previously had very strong growth in 2014, primarily in our managed services area.

Darren Ashley, managing director, BEarena

Yes, it was – Nutanix. We’re at the highest level of partnership. We enjoy a very close relationship and do a number of marketing events together. I also travel to the United States to visit them quite frequently. We’re a major part of their business and they’re a major part of ours. 

We experienced the growth we expected in 2015 relative to 2014. The main areas were in the data centre and in desktop virtualisation, replacing traditional three-tier architectures with much more simplified, hyperconverged solutions. We certainly expect to experience more growth with Nutanix in 2016.

New architectures are becoming much more widely accepted by the market, so when traditional architectures come up for replacement, alternatives such as hyperconverged architectures and cloud environments are making real headway.

Sturt Maclennan, director, The Cavalry

Our two key partners are Microsoft and Citrix. We are trying to embrace the next generation integrator or business partner model, according to Microsoft’s vision.

The two clouds we are focused on are Azure and Office 365. We saw a lot of growth in our hosted desktop platform in 2015 over 2014: we built a multi-tenant hosted desktop based on Citrix in the Azure environment. Hosted desktop is growing quickly and hosted desktop on Azure is growing even faster for us.

We’re building a relationship with SkyKick. Their business model is around Office 365 migrations, using tools that migrate customers to Office 365 in the most cost-effective and productive way.

Vendors that are wrapping solutions around Office 365, Azure and CRM Online are the types of partner that we’ll be working with, particularly when they’re partner-only.