Queensland Telstra partner Azentro has acquired major South Australian Telstra partner Data Mobility Voice for an undisclosed sum, as it looks to grow its national influence in telco services.
The deal will see Data Mobility Voice, the Adelaide-based telecoms equipment supplier, continue to trade as it is today, with co-owner Greg Fletcher Harris staying on as managing director, and benefitting from Azentro’s added network of capabilities.
Fletcher-Harris said the merger was a great route to growth for the company as it delivered a greater depth of services for his company's customers.
“For instance, we have a couple of people on our helpdesk, Azentro have five or six, so the level of service that we can provide to our customers is significantly enhanced by those depth of resources,” he said.
“That’s the prime motivation for us, to deliver a better experience for our customers and enable us to serve them better, through the consolidation of those sorts of resources centrally while keeping the Adelaide local touch of our engineers and sales guys account managers on the road, which is really important.”
Through the merger, the companies are looking to strengthen their presence in South Australia, as well as move more into Northern Territory. Data Mobile Voice, which has strong capability in local government, sees great benefit to come from some of Azentro’s offering
“We currently are not in the aged-care and healthcare business in Adelaide, we’re currently not in the vehicle tracking, telematics and Navman business here in Adelaide, whereas Azentro are significant in those two markets in other states, including Queensland,” Fletcher Harris said.
“We have a strong presence in local government as part of our core business, for instance, but a core product the local government utilise in Queensland is vehicle tracking and telematics. So it’s a natural for us to take a level of expertise that we inherit from the merger into our existing customer base, which again creates an environment that we can add value and extra services to.”
Azentro chief executive Paul Bouris said his company was seeking growth and saw a great opportunity merging with Data Mobility Voice, formalising an existing 20-year partnership the companies had enjoyed.
“We're always on the lookout for businesses that align with our values because we feel that they are key to keeping the momentum and growth of the business going,” he said. “We’ve worked with DMV for a long time, we’ve been supporting each other behind the scenes and in different projects and have collaborated in different areas.
Bouris said it would continue to be challenging for smaller partners to compete in telco and ICT services as the demand for a broad offering ramped up.
“I see the Telstra channel in particular as a space where more consolidation of business is going to occur, as it’s becoming more difficult to keep the scale and capability that’s required to be competitive,” he said.
“The key for DMV is they are much more capable as part of us than they would have been just on their own.
“If you don’t have depth of talent and resources it makes it risky to attempt the bigger projects.”
Data Mobility Voice has more than 100 regularly engaged customer relationships, covering the midmarket and local government. Bouris said Azentro, which was perhaps four times the size of DMV, was growing its customer base by about 25 percent through the merger.
Fletcher-Harris said all of DMV’s roughly 15 full-time staff would remain with the business, and that he took the company to sale with a view of a merger-oriented growth strategy in mind.
“I truly believe if we are going to grow we have to grow as being something bigger,” he said.
The merger follows the acquisition of another Adelaide-based Telstra partner Wireless Communications. The company, which Fletcher-Harris said was a DMV competitor, was snapped up by payment platform Echidna Pay owners Greg Patten and Dwayne Bonner.
Fletcher-Harris said while the two companies were indeed competitors, he suggested there were enough points of difference across areas of expertise and market segments that didn’t have the two firms butting heads too often.
“No doubt we’re the two dominant players in the South Australian market, and play respectfully so,” he said.
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