CRN Fast50 delegates discuss channel's future

CRN hosted two roundtables with Fast50 companies and awards sponsors. The weighty discussions sought to hear from the collective expertise in the room to unpack what is required of the future channel. 

The highlights are presented in the following slides. Click the arrows either side of the photo or use your arrow keys to scroll through.

DELEGATES
Alana Jacobs
Cloudten Industries
Andre Morgan
CMD Solutions Australia
Andrew Weir
Cirrus Networks
Brian Holder
Carpe Diem
Bruce Hara
Enable Professional Services
Callum McDonald
CSW-IT
Chris Eaton
Encoo
Connor O’Rourke
Nuago
Greg Markowski
Epic IT
James Howell
Professional Data Kinetics
James Lancaster
Renew IT
Jason McClure
Sliced Tech
Jo Masters
Tquila ANZ
Justin Yoon
AlphaSys
Ken Struthers
Barhead Solutions
Nathan Wright
NW Computing
Nicholas Owen
Secure Bits
Robert Adelman
ITtelligent Consulting Services
Robert Kingma
ICT Networks
Robert Kulik
Danet Technology
Sachin Verma
Oreta
Scott Reid
RIoT Solutions
Steve Wemyss
Calibre One
Tom Hiscutt
Engage Squared
Tony Khoury
Pitek
Vivek Trivedi
Exigo Tech

SPONSORS 
Ahmmad Issa
Synnex Australia
Brad Clarke
Microsoft
James Bergl
Datto
Louise Adami
Salesforce
Luke Power
Cisco
Steve Kletzmayr
Infinidat
Rodney Baurycza
TPG

FACILITATORS
Brad Howarth
CRN 
Nate Cochrane
CRN

CRN believes the channel is changing rapidly and profoundly. The shift to cloud and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence means selling and servicing hardware and software alone is in relative decline.

Vendors say new modes offer more opportunities for clever channel players to add value with services.

But the channel must transform while managing new cashflow cycles. So although business growth is sustainable, partners must adapt to the new business realities if they’re going to be around—and growing—in 10 years.

Getting from here to 2028
 
Brad Clarke, Microsoft
You must journey up the stack, think about the resources and talent you’ll need and how to partner as a channel community—especially partner-to-partner—to overcome challenges and better serve our customers. Many of today’s solutions will be commoditised by then, so think about technologies like AI, machine learning and cognitive services.
 
Ken Struthers, Barhead Solutions
Our next 10 years will be laser-focused on customer outcomes and alignment to someone with much deeper pockets than us to invent the AI, the machine learning and share that with the world. And then we just train up people and teams.

Pictured: Ken Struthers

Ahmmad Issa, Synnex
From a distribution perspective, it’s about volume today, and we need to shift that mindset. What investments do we make to ensure resellers are successful [in 2028] and that we [distributors] are relevant? And how do we become a solution provider [to the reseller and its customers].
 
Andrew Weir, Cirrus Networks
Many customers can handle their own infrastructure so we must offer smarter services that are relevant to their businesses. In Canberra, there’s a huge shortage of skills and, because there’s a fair staff training investment to deliver those solutions, we have to be smart about where we pivot next.
 
Callum McDonald, CSW-IT
We focus on hardware procurement and data centre services but as a new business, our growth comes from newer technologies. Our edge is moving faster than incumbents. Hyper-convergence has been a game-changer and we’ve won tender after tender. And you need to find recurring revenue streams, such as disaster recovery in the cloud.

Pictured: Andrew Weir

Luke Power, Cisco
The industry has become much more complex over the past 10 years and we forgot how we make things simpler to the customer. So in 2028, we’ll cut complexity and present relevant solutions to the customer.
 
Steve Wemyss, Calibre One
From the client’s perspective, we’re a linguist — we translate technology to their business requirements and that’s what we sell. The technology ‘stack’ of what is available changes all the time. So, you just keep up with it and you’ll have an ongoing trust relationship that carries you through the years.

Bruce Hara, 
Enable Professional Services
We make work easier to do. Our business revolves around human-centred design, enabling employees to work wherever they are on whatever device they’re using. Delivering your knowledge with your technology is important, but relationships, and how that works at scale, is what will win.

Pictured: Steve Wemyss

Change essentials: Skills, culture, mindset
 
Brad Clarke
[Microsoft’s] mindset attracts talent and is what makes us great as an industry. At Microsoft, we invest in mindfulness for our staff and partners that helps us to think differently and try new things. The channel skills shortage is a massive issue that leads often to unbearable costs. But how do we collectively invest in building skills? So we started a traineeship program with NSW TAFE that provides paid [internships to students] to lay a pathway to our industry.

Ahmmad Issa
If we hire someone today and they leave in six months it costs us $46,000 for training, certification and so on. So the core principle is how you treat your people [to retain them]. At Synnex, we find it very challenging because, as a volume distributor, we’re trying to become a solution partner and, if you invest in people, unfortunately they may leave you. [Collectively] we’re going to have a big struggle with skills.

Pictured: Ahmmad Issa, Synnex

Brian Holder, Carpe Diem

Bruce Hara
You think of how easy it is to manage our personal lives, to buy online and order Ubers and so on, but work is not that easy. Platforms via AI, machine learning and bots will make it easier to do our work and will create jobs that don’t exist now. Governance is a challenge, given the amount of data. As to the cost of skills, we commercialised that by starting a training division for our employees that also services [customers].

Pictured: Bruce Hara

Steve Kletzmayr, Infinidat
Australia is not a big, industrial country so people and culture are our most valuable assets. Diversity and the richness that implies when serving our customers as they reorganise for the future is a great strength. Think about who we’ll interact with in 10 years because the [IT decision-maker won’t just be the CIO]. Acceptance of change—whether it’s an IT project or the future of our nation—is probably our biggest hurdle. And IT has a role to enable the future.
 
Luke Power
Ten years ago, customers bought a collaboration technology to make a phone call but today CIOs use it to attract talent. They know this ‘millennial force’ is coming and they must be flexible. Diversity is hugely important; we run career sessions almost every month because we can’t find skills within our industry, so we go outside IT to attract graduate talent, train them up in IT over six to 12 months and employ them.

Pictured: Steve Kletzmayr, Infinidat

Jason McClure, Sliced Tech
Many founders can’t say ‘no’, and this ties into culture. Founders tend to be ego-driven; we want to improve, get big KPIs, have more staff and more revenue each year. It’s too easy to let anyone in the door but, from a SMB perspective, the wrong person can almost sink you. So we hire based on adherence to our values, which we rate over skills or experience. I can teach people most things if they want to learn but I can’t teach them good values. More founders should be disciplined, to say no to people with beautiful resumes if they want to grow into larger enterprises.
 
Alana Jacobs, Cloudten Industries
And talk to your staff to find out what makes them tick, because everyone’s in a different place in their life journey. If they just had a child they might want to stay home a bit more. We’ve got working parents who have different things that make them want to work harder. They might want to do training but it conflicts with picking-up the kids. I was surprised when a keen technologist said no to an AI project because they had a lot going on at home.

Pictured: Alana Jacobs

Get ready for AI
 
Ken Struthers
Over the next 10 years, we won’t worry about bits and bytes on the wire but how to plug in the right things to get solutions people haven’t even thought of yet. Facial recognition is now just part of the toolbox but five years ago we would have engineers and coders on it. Now, how do you dream that up into like ordering coffee in the morning?
 
Tom Hiscutt, Engage Squared
Weekly, we see resistance to AI. So we did a proof of concept with an enterprise customer for an HR bot that answers the top 100 HR questions, but it stops there because you’ll make a team redundant and step on someone’s territory. That’s traditional business bureaucracy but it has a big impact.
 
Jason McClure
The touch point for me was the ‘retinal scanning revolution’ of 2001 when my team—who were in delivery or operations and all had security clearances—were up in arms because they didn’t trust the US company with data from the retina scans. It was a seminal moment about learning how to engender trust in a random technology that applies to AI and other things. AI will ultimately make mundane decisions but critical choices will be left to humans, exceptions such as driverless cars notwithstanding.

Pictured: Jason McClure

Brad Clarke
We’ll put human intervention in place of AI when there’s a lack of trust and, when we see more instances where AI got it right first time, that trust may spike away from humans towards AI, which is a scary thought. But as we see humans make tragic errors such as a crane collapse or Space Shuttle explosion, the more we’ll see trust go towards the AI.

Pictured: Brad Clarke

Vivek Trivedi, Exigo Tech
By 2028, AI will do the mundane work enabling humans to add value to the vision and the mission of the company. We created bots to perform mundane ERP and CRM tasks like a supplier sending out an invoice, which is a standard process. Eight months ago we deployed 70 bots to a client’s accounts payable department that cut processing from 17 minutes to two seconds. And rather than sacking staff, the client redeployed them. That’s the beauty of automation — there’s human intervention but now people do quality, intelligent work.

Pictured: Vivek Trivedi

Luke Power, Cisco

Ensuring relevance five years from now

Andre Morgan, 
CMD Solutions Australia
Constantly keeping our skills and capabilities updated is the biggest challenge. The pace of technology is changing so much, as a specialist provider, we have to be careful that we don’t specialise in something that goes out of date. And we’ve got to keep a close eye on where demand is and what the clients need. We try not to use too much bleeding edge, because clients can get burnt on that, but certainly we are aware of it and build up the capabilities in new areas.

James Howell, 
Professional Data Kinetics
The pace of change is quick, but it’s not always like tomorrow there’s a new thing coming out. Just because someone’s first to market doesn’t mean that they’ll be the best. It could be more conservative to wait a little bit, but if you hold on and just look at who’s being successful in the market and what trends are coming in, you can step up second or third and do it slightly better as well.

Tony Khoury, Pitek
I’ve seen many first-to-markets which have great technology and are ahead of their time, but the market’s not comfortable with it. The typical customer in Australia is so risk averse, that stops a lot of the bleeding edge stuff. So the followers tend to win.

Pictured: James Howell

James Bergl, Datto
You have to create a culture of continual innovation. We’ve got think tanks that come together with smart people and encourage them to come up with new ideas every single quarter. We’re in the backup disaster recovery space, but three years ago one of the bright guys in the engineering team built a router, and that worked really well, so we’ve actually now gotten into the networking space as well.

Rodney Baurycza, TPG
You need to listen to what the customer is saying, but you need to add to that. Vendors will also have an input and drive a direction, and then if you’ve got the right staff that are forward looking, they will contribute ideas. It’s a combination of the three. It is more than just customers – vendors know what is happening maybe further out, and they have more research.

Pictured: Rodney Baurycza, TPG

Specialise or broaden focus?

Louise Adami, Salesforce
Speaking the language of the customer is really important to distinguish one partner from another. It’s about understanding the market that you’re aiming for and then building solutions.

Justin Yoon, AlphaSys
Specialisation means we can know an industry back to front. We can get our clients in a room and work out what the real challenges are, rather than guessing. Specialisation gives you the ability to test and learn and iterate and drive out the real solution you’re trying to get to, and then to release it more formally to the rest of the market.

Pictured: Louise Adami

Building skills for the future 

Jo Masters, Tquila ANZ
We’re doing a grad program and we’re taking our brightest and best and educating all the grads coming in. It’s exciting to see your brightest people passing on their knowledge and seeing the grads grow.

Rob Adelman, 
ITtelligent Consulting Services
I’ve had my business 12 years and three of my staff have been with me for 10 years. I always say my role is to look after them, and their role is to look after the client. I’ve had to hire five new people in the last two months and four of them have come from internships. I opened the opportunity for interns to come in. If you’re no good, you’re out, but if you’re good, stick around and you may have a job. Some of my key technical staff have been interns and it’s their first IT job.

Nicholas Owen, Secure Bits
We don’t hire based on skills, because we don’t see people who are trained in critical infrastructure. We find people that have the right attitude and values that match ours, then we accept that it’s going to take us 18 months to make them useful to us. When we find someone that bands together in a high stress situation, then they can start working in critical infrastructure.

Pictured: Rob Adelman

Chris Eaton, Encoo
On the front end, GUIs are improving and that’s making it easier for people to make complex changes. But somebody has to create that at the back end. So it’s twofold. Yes, it’s easier for those that are non-technical. But, for those that are technical, you’ve got to learn more and more, and be more cross-skilled. You can’t just be a ‘single vendor engineer’ these days. You’ve got to be multi-faceted, because we’re moving more and more towards white label hardware.

Robert Kingma, ICT Networks
More people can do more things with technology today, but when things go wrong, it’s much harder to find the problem - it’s hidden underneath the software-defined layer. So engineers do require a very broad skillset and very strong fundamental knowledge to be able to get down underneath that layer and address issues.  So are skills becoming less important? No, I don’t think they are.

Pictured: Rob Kingma

Barriers to growth

Greg Markowski, Epic IT
It’s just so easy for customers to switch now. So you have to move away from that break/fix to a business analyst-type mentality to keep customers. It’s easy to lose those customers if you’re not on your game. Thankfully we’ve got a really good retention rate of customers but that’s because we spend so much time listening to them and making sure what we’re doing is aligning with their business.

Justin Yoon
The lack of skills does mean the cost goes up, but when the cost goes up the willingness of the client to pay more isn’t growing at the same rate. It becomes a race to the top. What keeps me up at night most is how do I make sure my staff are happy or how do I sustain the growth where I’m able to constantly deliver quality that has gotten us to this point, and keep on doing that at a bigger scale.

Pictured: Justin Yoon

Creating scope for future growth

Tony Khoury
Everyone in the business needs to be in sales. Even the tech guys need to be trained or chosen on their ability to talk to people and not let the company down. Because how many times have you got all the way to getting the order, and then delivery mechanism is just terrible? But the biggest change is actually in management. If you’re a manager, your job is to pave the way for staff to do their job better. It’s not to tell them what to do. And when management changes, bad staff become good staff.

Chris Eaton
The key is automation, because if you automate as much as you can, then there’s less human input, which means there much less chance of mistakes. We’re going through a bit of a rapid growth stage, and we’ve been asked if we go offshore. And we’ve said no, we’re going to keep it all onshore, but we’ll automate. By automating and by gathering the data within our network and analysing that, we now have trends being delivered back to us. So we’re ahead of the game and not having to deal with downtime, and it’s improving margins, and really helping deliver value and keeping our clients happy. We’re not quite seeing the zero-month contract stuff come in yet, but we’re close in the networking space. If you’ve got a zero-month contracts you’ve really got to be delivering good value or they’re going to go.

Pictured: Chris Eaton

Callum McDonald, CSW-IT

Greg Markowski
Automation is a big thing that we’re working on behind the scenes, but in some aspects,  it takes that human component away. You want to keep delivering that client facing component. You almost want the client to ring you every now and then, because that gives you the opportunity to check in and see how things are going.

Pictured: Greg Markowski

Andre Morgan
We started out as a services business, but we’re taking the cashflow from the services business and investing in products that are going to ultimately allow us to grow so much more. A services-based business is around personal relationships and growth, whereas when you move to a product-based business you’re able to scale to a much larger size because it’s more about the repeatable processes.

Pictured: Andre Morgan

Key growth technologies

Jo Masters
I think AI has to be part of it, to be part of increasing the value to your customer. AI is integrated into Salesforce now, and we were one of the first partners to jump on board.

Nathan Wright, NW Computing
Data analysis is one of the biggest bits of value that we can be adding, and one the biggest ways to increase customers stickiness as well, and particularly if you can automate that. In the MSP space you do have a whole lot of visibility of customer infrastructure. That’s one of the things that stops us from losing sleep at night – by having the ability to crunch all this data for them in ways that they cannot do without you, that’s pretty powerful.

Pictured: Jo Masters

James Bergl
We’re also looking at AI/machine learning and bringing that onto the monitoring path as well. Monitoring management solutions are still relatively reactive, so we’re looking at actually using all the data over a period of time from a half million devices, analysing that, and being proactive about when we think that something might actually break.

Pictured: James Bergl

Growing without breaking what makes the company great

Nicholas Owen
This is our second time in the Fast50, and it will be our last time. Our growth goal has always been 20 staff. I don’t believe I can maintain the level of quality we offer now beyond 20 staff and that hasn’t changed for the 13 years we’ve been operating.

Pictured: Nicholas Owen

Robert Kulik, Danet Technology
At the moment we’re very small – there’s 12 of us in the office. As long as we can maintain the quality of service that we provide, which obviously got us here, and everyone on the team can really enjoy what we do, then we’ll grow. I don’t want to lose the type of clients we have at the moment. They choose us because we still have that connection.

Pictured: Danet Technology