Telstra partner merger spurs national expansion

IT services provider Calibre One has merged with Nexus Tel, a Northern Territory-based Telstra partner, in an arrangement that’s set to bolster the central Australian business’ plans for expansion across the country.

Chief financial officer Darren Gore told CRN the new Calibre One comprised 48 staff across three offices in South Australia and the Northern Territory, catered to about 2000 clients, and was expecting to bring in at least $8 million in revenue for the financial year of 2017.

Calibre One chief executive Steve Wemyss said the marriage of the two companies had combined the best parts of each to more suitably fit the growing demand for end-to-end technology services.

“IT guys need to understand telephony and the delivery of data services much better than what they typically do. Equally, telephony people are getting more and more managed services [work], there’s more and more data requirements, there’s more IT aspects to the telephony business; things that neither can really do themselves and it’s very difficult to build a baseline business in that other skillset from nothing,” he said.

The combined team recently migrated 100 staff onto Microsoft Office 365 at a Northern Territory medical organisation, with other infrastructure moved onto a Telstra dedicated cloud platform. Gore said the team was also working with ShoreTel to link the medical centre offices’ communication systems.

“We have now just signed off and are in the middle of a ShoreTel IP Tel solution rollout bringing all three sites into one single networked phone system with integration into their Skype for business and video platform, essentially expanding their mobility and reach to staff and patients,” he said.

Sunshine State

The motivated company has identified far north Queensland as its next market for growth, citing a few factors playing into that move.

“Far North Queensland is probably really one of our exciting growth stories at the moment,” Gore said. “With Far North Queensland, the reason we’ve looked at that as a project is because Nexus’ speciality has always been regional Australia… and bringing skillsets to those areas that they don’t normally see.

“We see Cairns and Townsville as basically the next logical step for us. We ran a fairly significant research project over a six-month period, trying to understand the local economy, the industries, what supported the economy, what the economy reacted to and how it contributed to GDP within Queensland and Australia as whole."

According to Gore, real estate and business markets in Cairns had grown on the back of tourism shored up by a weaker Australian dollar; presenting a good opportunity for Calibre One to invest.

Wemyss added there was also simplicity to the decision making process to expand toward Cairns and Townsville.

“At a practical level too, they’re similar markets in terms of size, size of clients and businesses, which makes it easy to take our model that we’ve consolidated in this first period and roll that out into new markets that are similar in many ways,” he said.

Wemyss said the work was all toward national growth, taking smart steps at a time.

“We want to continue to grow, we want to be a truly national partner and a national Telstra partner in every way shape and form around the whole country. But you’ve got to do it sensibly and grow outwards. So we start with core, move through those regional areas Darren identified as being good opportunities and grow out from there,” he said.