Perth's SolutionTech ramps up govt biz with new Canberra office

Perth-born managed services provider SolutionTech is doubling down on government work following its recent expansion into Canberra, securing more wins and contracts.

While the company has started to take on government work from around 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic delayed plans to open a physical office until mid-2022.

The Canberra CBD office was officially launched in October and was inaugurated by ACT chief minister Andrew Barr. Perth MSP and SolutionTech partner Red Piranha sponsored the launch event, while representatives from the University of Canberra, Canberra Cyber Hub, Australian Computer Society and Canberra Innovation Network were also present.

Speaking to CRN, SolutionTech founder and managing director Roy Borekar said Barr’s presence in the opening marked the ACT Government’s push for local businesses and cybersecurity businesses across the territory.

“We’re considered as one of Canberra’s cybersecurity startups, even though we’re not technically a startup since we’ve been around since 2016, but as a lean company, we still have a startup mentality and operation,” Borekar said.

“Now in Canberra, we’ve started to get more traction with a little bit of government subcontract work. We just won a small piece of work with the Department of Industry here as a resource base for a cloud solution architect.”

Borekar said the Perth office remains the primary business, looking after its small and medium enterprise client base, but the Canberra office now also works with larger clients in addition to government customers and a small number of SMEs.

Looking ahead, SolutionTech is exploring a potential reorganisation effort to an umbrella-like group of companies to allow the ACT business to focus on government and the other units to focus on SME customers.

The company is also set to launch a new offering, a bundled solution for its line of cybersecurity products for SME customers.

“When you say cybersecurity, [SME customers] usually just know about passwords and multi-factor authentication (MFA), but other than that, they don't know anything else,” Borekar said.

The solution will be available through a number of packages that customers can work up to depending on how their staff and users get comfortable around the solutions.

“That increases the cybersecurity posture and cybersecurity maturity model within the business,” Borekar said. “There is no point applying all the 100 controls all at once and then they can't even get access to it and people are complaining about all sorts of issues.”

“The idea behind is not to stop people from working and lock everything down. It's gradually increasing the security level. And at the same time training and making the users comfortable as well.”