Decision Inc Australia doubles down on data and analytics through vendor partnerships

The Australian office of South Africa-headquartered Decision Inc has been doubling down on data and analytics as part of its vendor partner strategy.

Over the past 12 months, the company has reached agreements with Microsoft, data science vendor Alteryx, predictive analytics specialist Board International, AI Cloud vendor DataRobot, advanced analytics vendor OneStream, and most recently, Australian freight and logistics AI automation vendor Provenio.ai.

Formerly known as ABM Systems until 2020, Decision Inc Australia had mostly focused on finance and planning solutions, specialising in implementation and optimisation services. The company then started to widen its focus on data and analytics over the past 18 months, making it a core practice locally.

“We've been building out a partner strategy that supports that whole move [to data and analytics],” Decision Inc Australia chief executive Aiden Heke told CRN.

“That means making sure we've got the right hyperscale cloud providers in place as we can scale our business to get the expertise to service those types of clients.”

The company partnered with Microsoft in April to provide architecture, design, deployment and management of Microsoft Azure services. It also now has allowed customers to purchase Azure subscriptions through an existing agreement with Rhipe.

“Microsoft is a big partner of ours, and we are a Gold partner here and in South Africa, and we focus on platform data analytics and modelling,” Heke said.

“So we looked at what other partnerships around analytics we can move towards, because our view is we’ve got to be able to do the basics really well, like helping a client figure out strategy through to architecting solutions for data platforms engineering, building and running it.”

Heke added that some customers have also increasingly looked to go into advanced analytics, which was where vendors like Provenio play.

“We've got this foundational partnership strategy, we've got the organisational capabilities and now we're looking at advanced analytics,” he said.

Also part of the strategy is to select niche providers, with a specific preference for Australian vendors, as part of its quest to fill gaps in the market for things like an artificial intelligence engine that can be used for automation problem solving, or for specific industry sectors.

“We’d like to partner with Australian vendors and we think that’s important. Obviously we need to be able to play with the global players, but it's an Australian economic recovery,” Heke said. “If we can help our brethren within Australia, then I think that's a good thing.”

Heke said their technologies got smart, using all of the core components of a great AI automation engine, and has had early successes in areas of the market where there’s lots of demand like supply chain logistics.