Shift to as-a-service helped Fast50 firm and HPE partner Onel Consulting double sales

Customer demand for as-a-service offerings helped Onel Consulting appear in the Fast50 for the fourth time last year.

In the 2023 financial year, the Melbourne-based IT infrastructure specialist won a five-year managed network services deal with Jeanswest, which involved an HPE Aruba SD-WAN implementation and hosted disaster recovery, delivered as a service, as well as a wireless and Teams telephony deployment spanning 121 offices.

Onel also signed up local government and education customers to its disaster recovery service and now has plans to expand its as-a-service offerings.

The company’s top verticals were local and state government, and a significant amount of its business was in the education and utility sectors.

Hardware sales for HPE and NetApp storage as well as HPE Aruba and Cisco networking made up half of Onel’s revenue. HPE accounted for 30 percent of its revenue.

All this resulted in a 125 per cent jump in revenue to $15.3 million in the 2022-2023 financial year, landing the firm in seventh place at the 2023 Fast50.

We spoke to Onel’s principal consultant Binal Hendawitharana about the firm’s growth and shift to an as-a-service model.

“[When Onel was founded] we initially started delivering projects [for customers]. Now we are changing to provide an as-a-service [offering] and customers paying monthly just like cloud, except [we are providing] dedicated customer-focused managed solutions,” he said.

“[This includes] disaster recovery as-a-service, SD-WAN as-a-service, network as-a-service; we’re changing our operating model more from project-based to longer term three-to-five-year contracts.”

“We provide the hardware, the services, everything, and bundle it up and provide it as a service.”

“[There is now] less reliance on project work and having an annuity business changes things and is one great milestone [for Onel].”

Onel’s shift to an as-a-service model has taken several years.

“Us changing our model, we were forced by the customers; that's what they were looking for, they were always in public cloud, but they saw a lot of problems in the public cloud, but they liked the operating model of public cloud,” he said.

“We are providing a similar service, because customers didn’t want to pay that upfront money; they like the flexibility of changing, paying monthly and getting as a service.”

In the 2023 financial year, Onel launched its disaster recovery as-a-service offering.

“We signed up about five customers including two councils and a TAFE college, a school and Jeanswest.”

“Most of these customers, they have an on-prem production site and they also have an on-prem disaster recovery site.”

“What we did was take the disaster recovery service and put it in a proper data center, a Tier 1 data center, and provide the entire infrastructure.”

“That includes server, storage, compute, data protection, firewalls, and we provide that as a service where our customer pays us a monthly fee.”

Onel next plans to expand its as-a-service offerings and capabilities.

“We are working with Rubrik, our new backup provider. We're going to provide data protection as-a-service,” said Hendawitharana.

“We are going to expand our network services; we will expand our network capability.”

“Before we only did the core networking and Wi-Fi deployments, but we need to provide more in-depth network security services.”

“We have also been rather busy in the data centre space for many years and while there is greater focus on consolidation and convergence in that space too, we still see many opportunities.”

“We have been busy relocating customers to data centres, consolidating and migrating workloads and applications, and I don’t see this changing.”

“Looking at some of the projects we carried out [in the 2023 financial year] I see many more customers wanting similar outcomes.”