Igor Matich (Dynamo6)
“Go hard. There is a bigger opportunity now for companies to become smarter.”
These are the words of Dynamo6 founder and executive director Igor Matich, who reckons that the current business climate and what comes next when the ‘new normal’ emerges will be ripe with new opportunities for partners plying cloud craft.
“They can leverage the public cloud to improve systems, processes and costs,” Matich told Reseller News, referring to the ways in which businesses can get the most out of their IT dollars as they weather a disrupted market. “This goes hand in hand with what we do: help organisations optimise their existing IT expenditure.
“As a cloud services partner, we see a big opportunity to accelerate some foundational technology projects. In downturns, innovation grows,” he added.
Indeed, according to Matich, Dynamo6 is using this time to focus on solving business problems for customers, not on just managing their technology.
“Nothing has changed for us. In fact, for us, this is an opportunity,” he said.
Founded in 2012 by Matich after he left a corporate career with a desire to build a cloud-native technology services company that thrives on change, Dynamo6 is a full-service technology house that works with mid-market and large businesses, including government agencies across Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington.
Today, the company that started as a small Hamilton-based start-up has grown into a team of over 20 staff.
Dynamo6 partners with a range of global technology vendors and platform providers, including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), being certified with the three largest cloud providers in the world.
Broadly, Dynamo6 makes its crust migrating business infrastructure to the cloud, moving the likes of Tainui Group Holdings to AWS. It also migrates businesses to G Suite and Microsoft 365, cloud productivity suites that enable businesses to work collaboratively and securely from anywhere — a valuable offering in an era of distributed and remote workplaces.
With a focus on the mid-market, the company takes customers on a digital transformation journey in which technology and IT is a value-add and a differentiator versus a cost-centre.
This aspect, and the focus on cloud-based solutions, plays well into the company’s current market positioning. Indeed, according to Matich, the company is seeing a large number of G Suite and Microsoft 365 projects coming up in the market.
“Businesses were depending on tools like Teams or Google Meet to keep in touch,” Matich said. “Moving towards a digital workplace means that employees can connect and collaborate from anywhere at lightning speed. The office is no longer confined to one place.”
How the partnering game has changed
After the initial rush to cloud-based collaboration solutions that many organisations embarked on when lockdown restrictions first came in, Matich said that moving to the cloud is still prevalent.
However, from Matich’s perspective, expectations will grow from customers. Organisations will expect more thought leadership and partnering rather than simple solution selling, which makes sense. The partnering adds value when it works for both parties.
At the same time, Matich reckons that customers will be more sensitive to return on investment (ROI) and what they invest in. As such, successful partners will have to be able to demonstrate value.
With ROI calculations set to become more important, vanity projects and proof-of-concepts will drop, according to Matich.
“For example, using artificial intelligence (AI) technology as a solution to innovation rather than understanding and solving the business problem,” he said.
At the other end of the tech spectrum, Matich and team expect spending on core platforms, productivity suites, security and cloud adoption roadmaps to continue.
“People want to be working from anywhere and businesses want to make sure it’s secure,” Matich said. “This will grow beyond email and chat usage. Documents and file sharing will also be included and applications that aren’t SaaS [Software-as-a-Service] will be scrutinised."
At the same, business application consolidation is expected to take place as organisations work to reduce wasted spend, while the productivity tools chosen by businesses during lockdown may have overlapping functionality. Moreover, ‘shadow IT’ applications are likely to be evaluated.
There will be more due diligence introduced into technology decisions and there will be a greater impetus to get projects delivered.
The value in thinking lean
Naturally, these developments are all being driven by the challenges that most businesses are facing — and are likely to continue facing in the coming months.
With overall uncertainty, and businesses operating internationally set to face even bigger challenges than those focused on just the domestic market, organisations will be asking themselves: ‘how do they reduce cost?’ according to Matich.
“How do they realise that technology can be an enabler for them?” he said. “And they will be considering whether they choose to stand still or take it as an opportunity to innovate or pivot.”
Further, there will be the challenge of organisations managing the wellbeing of their people due to long periods of being a disparate workforce, with people unable to get out and about easily and or go on holiday.
For Matich, technology has a part to play in supporting people’s wellbeing.
Here is where the opportunities for partners emerge.
Businesses have to think lean right now. This means that, for businesses looking at their internal strategy, they need to think as if they just were starting out, according to Matich. Would they do the same things that they currently do? And importantly, what technology would they have and why?
“Organisations have accumulated lots of technical debt they now have to unbundle,” Matich said. “Look at businesses similar to you that start during this time, see what tools they don’t use and ask yourself why.
“Think about how you transact with your customers. Look at how you could digitise. Businesses that look to remove manual processes, will unlock their people’s potential. They can focus on continuous improvement and this will result in better experiences for customers,” he added.
Importantly, organisations also need to look at how they could grow revenue or unlock new revenue opportunities — all questions that could be answered by, at least in part, technology.
This is where cloud, Dynamo6’s core area of expertise, comes in.
“Cloud should be a gateway drug,” Matich said. “Providing companies have invested time in their people and process when adopting cloud. They should be seeing transformations benefits and changes that they will surely want to unlock more of.
“It’s not that complicated if you get it right, maintaining on-premise and out-of-date systems is more complex,” he said.
Reseller News Advance is a centralised editorial resource designed to help partners access forward-looking content as the New Zealand market attempts to reposition for growth.
