SecureData heads SQL attack with NZ acquisition

Storage reseller and services provider SecureData Group has bought a controlling stake in a New Zealand-based database management company, SQL Services.

The move is tipped to help SecureData Group –- a Microsoft partner –- back Microsoft's push for Oracle and DB/2 market share as a 64-bit version of SQL Server hits the enterprise space.

Evan Penn, managing director at SecureData Group, said the Sydney-based company had been seeking ways to partner with companies in the database management space since it started expanding its services offering 18 months back.

“They were looking for a partnership in Australia,” Penn said. “We called them to see if we could talk about what we are doing. They wanted to move to Australia but didn't have sales and marketing, but did have very strong skill-sets in the SQL [Server] space.”

SecureData Group was not ready to go public with the exact amount of its controlling stake, he added.

Penn said sales and marketing for SQL Services would remain headquartered in Nelson in the north of the South Island. It would be carried out in New Zealand by Singapore-owned integrator Computerland, and that arrangement would continue.

SQL Services -– a small company with 10, mainly technical, staff –- had done some consulting work for Australian customers but had not yet gained an ongoing presence in the Australian market, he said.

“A lot of back-end delivery will end up being done out of Nelson, and Sydney and Melbourne,” he said.

Penn said SQL Services dominated the New Zealand SQL Server database support market. The company was the only Asia-Pacific-based firm dedicated to providing remotely-managed services for Microsoft SQL Server.

“Remote database management is not hugely talked about and there are not a lot of companies offering it. These guys have grown up in a very niche environment and excelled in the SQL space,” Penn said.

He said customer demand here in specific verticals meant that two more database engineers were already being added to SQL Services' New Zealand team.

SecureData partners Microsoft, Sun, Veritas, Hitachi Data Systems, Cisco and Quantum, Penn said. The company was building up its managed services packages and was investigating more options and offerings for SQL Services' skills here -– particularly as Microsoft ramped up against Oracle and IBM DB/2 in that space.

“I personally think this is the beginning of a huge growth curve. There are parts of an organisation that are crucial but don't want a lot of individual resources from an organisation's point of view dedicated to them,” Penn said.

He also expected to develop new managed services initiatives with Computerland in coming years.

“I think there are huge opportunities for integrators and managed services providers,” Penn said.

SQL Services CEO Colin Andersen would move to Australia this month to head the SQL push here.

“We came to Australia about 12 months ago to assess whether the same market conditions existed here as in New Zealand, and we discovered that no one operates in our space,” Anderson said.