Harbour IT cracks $40m with Canon, NetApp and Pure Storage

Harbour IT grew revenues to more than $40 million in and posted a profit of $2.3 million in its first full year under the majority ownership of Japanese printing giant Canon.

The result was a “considerable improvement on previous years”, according to Harbour's 2016 annual report. Revenue rose 10 percent to $40.8 million for the 12 months to 30 June 2016.

This was up slightly more than $4 million on 2015, when Harbour IT turned over $36.8 million.

Harbour IT chief executive Michael Giusti said that in union with Canon, which acquired the majority of Harbour IT in 2014, the Sydney-headquartered IT service provider had seen its best year ever.

“We’re looking at it more as a calendar year at the moment, and we’ll probably finish up with about $40-47 million in revenue for the year,” he said. “When we first partnered with Canon it was probably around $30-31 million, so we’ve grown pretty substantially in the short period of time that we’ve been working together.”

That partnership, Giusti said, has given Harbour IT the scale required to smooth bigger transactions through the gates.

“Being part of Canon has given us the credibility in the market for us to be able to deal with enterprise-level organisations. When you’re part of a bigger group, the financial risk of where we were before as a private company really goes away. Other big organisations feel much more comfortable dealing with bigger organisations as well,” he said.

Falling under the Canon Business Services group, Harbour has remained largely unchanged, with Canon opting for a light-touch approach.

“Canon loves what Harbour is, they love our brand, and they love our customers, so what they want to do is help us become a better company and continue to provide really good services to our customers, but they're not trying to absorb us into Canon,” Giusti said.

Giusti said a lion’s share of the revenue gains could be attributed to “the big six” – six major projects Harbour undertook in the past 12 months. These included major office relocations, moving ERP systems into Harbour’s cloud, and IT infrastructure updates.

“A lot of our customers have had changes, whether it's office relocations, or infrastructure refreshes come up. That's then spawned the projects that enable us to come up with a solution,” he said.

In documents logged with corporate regulator ASIC, cloud business was cited as a solid source of growth. “FY16 was another year of strong growth in cloud revenue. The business continued to achieve strong sales in the cloud market which have translated into higher annuity revenues for this area."

Giusti said Harbour’s investment in disaster recovery platform CloudMetro was an area expected to deliver further growth into 2017.

“Recently we significantly upgraded our whole cloud infrastructure with our CloudMetro platform,” he said. “We're sticking to our Cisco partnership from that perspective and we've got two storage partners with NetApp and Pure Storage. They're really key partners for us. With CloudMetro, which is a stretch cluster between Equinix, and NextDC we've effectively doubled the capacity in the last 12 months.

“So we're continuing to really invest heavily and we will now be a complete flash storage cloud provider.”

The chief executive said 2017 was looking bright and the company remained dedicated to the delivering the same strong outcomes it had become known for.

“We've set out plans for the next year, it looks really, really good, our number one goal is to continue to look after our customers, our people,” he said.

Founded in 2001, Harbour IT has built a strong reputation thanks to its mix of enterprise vendors including NetApp, Symantec and Microsoft, and is particularly known for its data centre acumen.