Fuse Technology's MD on the company’s 'interesting' year

“Pride” was how Fuse Technology chief executive and founder Chuong Mai-Viet summed up his feelings when his company was named Partner of the Year at the 2025 techpartner.news Impact Awards earlier this year.

The company also took out the Business Transformation Award on the night for its work enabling A.E. Smith’s IT separation from Downer Group.

“Our team has won a few awards - we won APAC Solution Partner of the Year with Ingram Micro, for example – but this was the first award that was from an ‘independent' awarder [instead of a vendor],” he said.

“Having been involved in judging panels previously, I know what it took [to win] and I’m proud of the team.”

Awards aren’t the only success in what Mai-Viet termed an "interesting" year for the company, however.

While 2025 has seen “good” business growth, landing Fuse Technology a spot in the techpartner.news Fast50, he said that this growth has also been the source of the company’s biggest challenge for the year: hiring.

“Our biggest challenge is getting our hands on good people,” he told techpartner.news.

“The amount of effort involved is a lot harder now. There's a lot of candidates but they don't have the right skills and capability.

“But it's a good problem to have in that it means we're growing; it's not like we're churning staff. It's a growth problem, so anytime you've got a growth problem, it's a good problem.”

Fuse Technology also opened an office in Vancouver, Canada just over a year ago, which Mai-Viet said is going well, and the company’s UK office is also picking up steam with “some good wins and some good runs on the board”.

Security and automation

Mai-Viet said the plan for Fuse Technology into 2026 and beyond was to make the most of the opportunities in security and automation, stating that the company sees “continuing opportunity” in the Microsoft security stack.

“We still think there's huge opportunity in the security space [as] there's still a lot of clients that aren't secure,” he explained.

“The other thing that we see as an opportunity is definitely AI and automation. The Copilot agents, business process automation, using AI - we definitely think that there's a real challenge there, so we're toying with the phrase ‘intelligent workspace’.

“It's more about, you've got all these tools - how do you use them better? Efficiency and the staffing challenges are still going to be the biggest pain points for SMBs in Australia, so [figuring out] how to get the tools that clients already have working better is a huge opportunity.”

Mai-Viet said that he believes MSPs that can “really partner” with their clients and show value will differentiate themselves from other players who just handle help desk tickets and roll out computers.

“When we talk to our customers, the biggest thing they value from us in partnership - 'Fuse helps me with my technology, Fuse understands my business and helps us get the most out of what we have',” he explained.

“When I talk to new clients, that's why they're talking to us [too] - ‘my existing MSP is not proactive, they just fix stuff, they only come out when we ask them to, we can never get a hold of them, etc' - whereas I feel that we really should be in the face of our clients all the time.

“We really should be talking to them about business, about partnering, about how we help them make their business more efficient, more scalable. Because the bigger they get, the bigger we get and I want my clients to grow as fast as I am.”