Hosted Network expects continued growth from underserved WA market

Hosted Network, a cloud and telco services provider for MSPs, is expecting to see further growth off the heels of a strong past 36 months as it expands into new markets, according to chief executive Ben Town.

In this CRN Pipeline delegate profile, Town told CRN that Hosted Network saw growth over the past few years after the COVID-19 pandemic changed its customers’ buying behaviours, and expects that to continue in the next 12 months after recently expanding into Western Australia.

“It's been a crazy 36 months [for us] - COVID was obviously a very interesting time for all of us since it changed the way that we all had to work, but for us it certainly changed the buying behaviours for a lot of our customers. And for the last 12 months, they’re basically just ramping harder and harder every month,” he said.

“The IT industry, especially the services side, has really been able to grow quite considerably despite the hardware limitations and stock availability.”

Hosted Network last month announced it had expanded its public cloud offering to Perth, offering managed services providers across Western Australia access to locally run infrastructure with lower latency connections.

“We see WA as a bit of an underserved market in a lot of ways, so for us we’re focusing over there and really looking at how we can ramp up our partner recruitment efforts and our general enablement efforts across the board,” Town added.

“You get so much of a focus on the east coast as always - it’s always Sydney and Melbourne and maybe the big conferences up in the Gold Coast - and meanwhile we’re finding a lot of wins in WA just by being present over there.

“Going there, expanding our footprint there and having boots on the ground has been working quite effectively for us and it is just really surprising how underrepresented the region of WA actually is.”

As for the general economic climate, Town said there would be some hesitation on what might be around the corner and that a potential downturn would reduce the uptake of new services and impact growth, but the IT sector is still recruiting and actively growing.

“The services that Hosted Network provide I would like to think are somewhat recession-proof - they’re kind of critical to business operations in many cases,” he said.

“Telephony, cloud and connectivity are not necessarily low hanging fruit for businesses to cut for the sake of savings.

“But I always like to err on the side of caution and we will probably adjust some of our growth plans if we do get to that point to be more on the conservative side just in case. And hey, if we exceed expectations, then great!”

Town added that it would be naive to overextend even if Hosted Network is seeing very healthy growth at the moment. “Like anything in life, things can change very, very quickly,” he said.

Like its MSP customers, Hosted Network also felt the tech talent shortage even if its offerings did not require direct labour due to its focus on automation and streamlining, citing challenges with hiring senior level staff in the company’s ongoing recruitment round.

“[Senior level staff] is definitely harder to find and the wages are higher than they’ve ever been in the IT industry,” Town said.

“In a meeting with customers, some shared that they would hire software developers that would be trained out of university and whatnot, but would later be hired by a large vendor with absolutely exorbitant salaries.”

Town added Hosted Network is also regularly discussing creative ways about how the sector could attract more talent, with people coming up with a few tricks of their own.

“I dare say the labour shortages are a bigger issue and more prominent on people’s minds than a recession at the moment. Yes, they are growing but they can’t get the techs to do the work that enables them to close off their projects and go to that next stepping stone within their business,” he said.

Ben Town is the founder and CEO of Hosted Network, a wholesale cloud and telco provider for MSPs offering white label cloud services. Some of its other offerings include infrastructure as a service, VoIP and internet connectivity solutions.

Town is one of the many channel industry leaders attending this year's CRN’s Pipeline conference from 23 to 26 August on the Gold Coast. Register your interest in attending the conference.