Former Versent managing director Rob Frendo has launched technology, engineering and product consultancy Nexifi.
The consultancy was formed in partnership with Carl Rigoni, who is ex-Versent director of product and customer experience and former CEO of Melbourne digital product practice SixSix.
The co-founders’ resumes also include stints at Australia Post – in Rigoni’s case, that included digital transformation of legacy Australia Post products and development of new digital products. Frendo was director of solution development and also led a sales team across the Australia Post digital services suite.
Nexifi has a team of 31 - including a two-person delivery centre in Manila - and 15 open roles.
One of its clients is Versent, which in late 2023 accepted a $267 million acquisition offer by Telstra.
The consultancy’s core capabilities will include digital, CX, change management, data, AI, CRM, cloud and DevOps. But Frendo said the goal is to do ‘soup to nuts’, from a solution to an outcome.
“That means everything from advisory to build to run; we expect to be able to hold that gamut together for a customer with confidence and provide them with a complete solution,” he said.
He also intends to provide economies of scale and enable clients to “rationalise their partnering ecosystem”.
From his nearly seven years at Versent, Frendo said what he will carry forward most into Nexifi is not the “incredible” growth the company saw during his tenure – expanding from a team of 50 to 700 – but a focus on people and culture.
“The first thing we wrote down when we started Nexifi was employee experience and customer experience are on level pegging - we're not going to prioritise one ahead of the other,” he said.
“It’s not just words. We put money behind it and we put effort behind it,” Frendo said about the new firm’s employee experience program.
Frendo and Rigoni also bring client-side experience. “I know what it feels like on the client side,” Frendo said. “I know what it feels like to perhaps not have all the controls. I know what it feels like not to get an outcome. So we really just channel those emotions when we're building this business.”
“We're a solution, not an ingredient”
Nexifi was born out of what Frendo claims is “a big need” in the Australian market for more nimble, outcome-based and practical consultancies.
“There's a lot of consultancies and thought leadership out there, but we position ourselves as an outcome driven business. We don't see ourselves as a project-based organisation that flies in and flies out - we're a solution, not an ingredient,” he said.
“We try to do a lot of groundwork in advisory and presales to make sure the customer is ready for a fixed price contract at our price point. That takes us away from the lowest common denominator and always battling on factors such as commercials.”
“We run a BOT [build, operate and transfer] framework - build, operate and transfer back to the customer. Our intention is to teach our customers to fish rather than just giving them a fish.”
He talked up the ‘golden triangle’ of product, user experience and engineering.
“We don't divorce the three and when those three come together, what we tend to find is we get the optimal outcome for the customer, and we also get the optimal outcome around expectations,” Frendo said.
“We certainly spend a lot of time, perhaps more time than other tech organisations, working on our product architecture, services ladder and product validation process.”
“It transcends from a product strategy process to a product validation process into delivery framework, and that means we've got development readiness, iteration management, high velocity feature releases and then future backlog, which all provides a really clear framework and architecture for business, tech and user stakeholders.”
Jump-starting developers
Among the opportunities for Nexifi is harnessing AI with digital applications and user experience.
“We feel the impact of AI is probably even underestimated,” he said. “We can hardly think of a single digital application out there that that sits with the consumer or citizen where AI can't play an active role.
CIOs want “practicality” from AI, Frendo said.
He sees an opportunity to match AI with omnichannel experiences, which he described as “sub-optimal”.
Nexifi is “fusing” AI into its digital applications, product validation processes and engineering.
He also sees AI giving his developers a “jump-start”, referring to OpenAI’s focus on software development with the latest release of its o3 model.
“We don't really see at this point it taking over the roles of an engineer, but we certainly see one engineer being able to do the role of a 1.25 or a 1.5 with the initial code in those first couple of sprints.”
“We're working on that right now. We're moving Figma and a number of other of our tools directly into code and we're doing that in a way that we feel AI is going to play a major role.”
Other opportunities include correcting the ghosts of cloud implementations past. In Frendo’s view, many organisations’ initial cloud strategies resulted in them moving from an application that was sub-optimal to a cloud application that was sub-optimal.
“Where we're headed now is around modernisation of those applications, getting feature releases in a quicker manner, making sure if you're moving from physical to cloud that you're actually getting the financial benefit that the business case stipulates, and then making sure that you're able to attract better talent through engineers, infrastructure, DevOps and also development, because you've now got cloud-based applications and architecture,” he said.
“Having those things in place is a lot more rigorous. It's a lot more difficult to get there than what people have called ‘lift and shift’ in the past, but moving to cloud the right way, you'll get tremendous benefits.”
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