Oakton's tough move from people to SaaS

Oakton is hoping to radically change the make-up of its revenue base, from a largely "people-based" company to one that generates more sales from software-as-a-service.

Chief executive Neil Wilson told CRN that, roughly three years ago, 90 percent of Oakton's revenue would have been "roles-based".

Wilson says that within two to three years, Oakton hopes that 30 to 40 percent of revenue will be "non person-based".

"Otherwise we have to invest in people to get more revenue," said Wilson.

[Who was at Oakton's Innovation Breakfast?]

As a publicly listed company, Oakton's challenge is to convince investors to support change.

"It is costing us a lot to get there and the market doesn't always like that. But if we don’t change our business model, we will not be here, we will be irrelevant," said Wilson.

Today, service and solution integration revenue is not more than 10 percent, said Wilson, "but if I look at the pipeline, it is a very different matter".

The company is building up a portfolio of software as its moves toward the concept of an "Oakton Enterprise App Store".

Oakton's wouldn’t be a true app store; applications would still require six to eight weeks of custom development, typically at its offshore operation in Hyderabad, India.

Triple threat

The company is currently focusing on three business areas: employee collaboration, grant management and Oracle e-business-as-a-service, leveraging Oakton's key vendors, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and – most importantly – Dimension Data.

Oakton's SaaS offerings are hosted on the DiData cloud, with AWS and Azure used for some cloud bursting.

Wilson explained that Oakton has already built much of its intellectual property through past customer engagements, and now would look to layer this IP on top of vendors' solution stacks, with only limited customisation needed to roll the products out to new customers.

For instance, employee collaboration is built on Microsoft SharePoint, hosted by DiData and paid on a per-user cost. While the product has only been in the market for six months, "this process started in 2007 with Education Queensland", said Wilson.

The grant management offering is built on Microsoft CRM and often replaces unwieldy homegrown processes used by customers. "Imagine managing a couple of billion dollars on an Excel spreadsheet," said Oakton's chief solution and innovation officer, Shaji Sethu.

The first announced deployment of Oakton Oracle e-business as a service was a projectwith Barrick Gold, revealed back in August.

The project was a partnership with Western Australia-based IT company Empired; Wilson told CRN that future collaborations were less likely following Empired's acquisition of Melbourne-based SharePoint specialist OBS.

[Related: Perth IT firm in $15m east coast mega-merger]