The formula for Fast50 firm Novo3's 317% revenue growth

Melbourne-based ICT integrator Novo3 scored first place in the 2023 Fast50 off the back of bespoke infrastructure deployments for some of the largest independent schools in Victoria, and its work in the aged care sector.

Founded in 2021, the firm provides cloud, networking, infrastructure and security consulting and managed services.

In the 2023 financial year, more than three quarters of its revenue came from hardware for the midmarket, including servers, storage, PCs and peripherals, with HPE products accounting for over half of sales.

The firm also started providing 24 x7 network operations centre and helpdesk services for education and aged care clients.

All this resulted in Novo3’s revenue more than quadrupling to $11.3 million, by far the fastest revenue growth in the 2023 Fast50.

We spoke with its chief executive Shehan Suri about Novo3’s growth.

He described the firm’s work with education clients.

“A couple of [projects] we did [last] financial year was with one of the private schools…they've got five data centres across three campuses,” Suri said.

“[It was a] large infrastructure refresh; the customer had different workloads in a database…and not so friendly storage workloads.”

“[We delivered] a solution that was more of a hybrid model in terms of the storage requirements for them.”

“The main requirement was storage more than compute from an infrastructure point of view.”

“[It involved] looking at their storage, Affinity, and going ‘Okay, this is the right fit for you, this data centre should have this,’ and addressing those application and technical requirements, and then basically saying, ‘this is what your solution will look like for the next four years.’ That's what we did for them.”

Another growth area was providing managed services to private aged care customers.

“…the focus has been on managed services for us, and we’ve won some large contracts where we’re providing end-user support, infrastructure support for aged care customers,” Suri said.

“It [is] more of a business and an operational discussion and a requirements gathering, rather than a technical discussion.”

“In the aged care space, for example, [our team assessed] how the residents are looked after, what sort of clinical applications are being used, what the nurses use and how they function throughout the day, what their pain points are, [and] how we can assist them in improving that care.”

Suri expects that the company will need to adapt operationally as artificial intelligence (AI) is adopted in the aged care industry.

“There's a lot of automation being built into the aged care space now,” he said.

“There are smart applications coming about that's got a lot of AI built in to gather information about residents; what they do, what their movements are like; trend analysis within the operational side or on the technical side.

“That's obviously going to have a flow on effect on what we do as well because the applications change and we need to change how we operate.”

Suri said Novo3’s strategic goals remain the same as it aims to continue growing.

“We've been around for two and a half years now, and the company started on the back of engineering, not so much from a sales perspective,” he said.

“…our priority was ‘let's [create] an organisation that is driven by technical engineering…and ensuring that the customer gets really good service at the end of the day.”

“We saw a need for good managed services, good consulting, having good security…an over-arching security layer across everything.”

“Our priority and our goals haven't changed in terms of guiding that good customer service.”