What kept the channel up at night in April?

Cyber security, AI and business strategy were a selection of the woes afflicting affecting the Australian channel during the month of April, however there were some partners who were worry-free.

During the month, ARN spoke with a number of IT decision makers in the Australian IT channel and asked them what keeps them up at night.

AI weighed heavy on the minds of a number of business leaders during the last month, a recurring theme from March.

Fusion5 CEO Sven Martin’s current worries are focused on the state of cyber security, which he said to ARN is “the one thing that you can just never be sure” about.

“Have you got enough in place all the time? You think you have, you put enough focus on it, you’ve got enough people looking at it, you do a lot of investment in it, but is it enough? You don’t want to wake up and be in the news,” he said.

It’s these concerns that are driving Fusion5 to have a significant emphasis on cyber security, with Martin adding that its business has taken a proactive stance towards it. Despite this, he wishes that this wasn’t “something that we all had to worry so much about”.

“You just don’t know what’s going on, who’s out there, what’s going to happen. I feel for these organisations have experienced that. It would be extremely horrible.

“For me, that’s the one that you will have the least control over. At least with all the other challenges, because we all face them all the time, you do have an element of control over how you’re going to manage your way through that; you can architect something there. If [there’s] something you’ve got no control over, that freaks me out.”

High-performance computing and generative AI infrastructure vendor Sharon AI’s chief operating officer, Andrew Leece, told ARN the rate of change across the technology industry is what’s currently occupying his thoughts.

“In order to mitigate that [change], we see long term enterprise customers on term contracts, but in saying that, … what we’re actually experiencing in real time is that the GPUs that we bought in early 2021 are still at almost 100 per cent utilisation at the same rates that we were offering to the market four years ago,” he said.

The other element to this discussion for Leece is that he believes that he views the current industry landscape as being at the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of technology adoption and its resulting capabilities.

“The research and higher education ecosystem have, and will always have, an immense need for this type of compute [which] has traditionally been provided by government or non-government organisations,” he said.

“With the expansion of our business, there’s no reason that we could not simply take over at a commercially competitive rate all the workloads for Bureau of Meteorology or CSIRO or any of these types of customers. We’re working hand in hand with NCI [National Computational Infrastructure] and Pawsey [Supercomputing Research Centre] now to offer a complimentary capability off the side of those organisations. They’re the largest publicly available super computer resources that Australia has today.

“While the rate of change is rapid, the road of adoption is also only really just getting started.”

The AI factor

LimePoint director Goran Stankovski has two things on his mind, with the first being the rapid change of AI.

“The speed with which the market’s moving, particularly around the AI space, where it was six months ago to where it is now; there’s been phenomenal advancements in that, let alone in the last three months,” he said to ARN.

“The big thing about that is, if you’re not doing anything in that space, and you’re not aligning yourself to where these large transformational activities are happening, you could quite easily be left behind.”

The other thought taking up residence in his mind is making sure to keep his focus on his business’ strategic direction.

“We are a consulting organisation. We’re dependent on doing project work. We’ve got to continually keep signing up new customers and new projects, so we can continue operating as a business,” he said.

By not focusing on that direction and keeping in touch with emerging trends, partners can miss out on growth opportunities, Stankovski added.

“It’s easy to lose sight and go, ‘Oh no, we need to win the next piece of work or the next project.’ Before you know it, you’ve lost sight of the ball and the market’s shifted quite substantially away from where you are,” he said.

Synapsewerx CEO Malcon Ingram is deep into AI, since it’s the MSP’s core focus.

For Ingram, particularly at the C-suite, high profile success stories of AI integrations are giving off the impression that utilising the tech is quick and easy, but the truth is anything but.

“There’s an expectation that AI is really easy because we have it on our mobile phones and we can use it every day,” he said. “I can jump online and go into Gemini and do some deep research really quickly that would normally take me weeks. There’s a general perception at the C-level sea level that this capability is really easy to implement.

“There’s a reality though, and we see this in many these surveys, where a lot of the implementation of AI is not so successful; it’s not getting through to production.

“This keeps me awake at night because I’m wondering why it is. I know from personal experience now, because we’ve done so much work in this space, that if you just want to take a GenAI large language model and use it within your organisation – whether it’s through RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), whatever guardrails you put around it – it’s geared towards a particular use case.

There’s an expectation that there should be the ability “ability to plug it in and it’s going to do a great job,” noted Ingram. There’s an expectation that “it’s going to get it right 90 per cent of the time, the “reality” is it won’t,” explained Ingram.

However, some partners are so confident and can sleep soundly at night, like Annexa director Matt Owens.

He told ARN his business has grown to the point where it’s autonomous.

“We’ve got a very capable team and we’re not single point sensitive across any of the functions in our business,” said Owens. “We don’t have any key man risks and that we’ve got that size where it runs itself and that pulling people out [is] not going to cause any disruption.

He explained when Annexa was smaller sensitivity across functions might’ve been an issue however having “great people” helps.

“Now, … I can’t think of something that keeps me up at night,” said Owens.

Vendor views

Monday.com Asia Pacific and Japan director of partnerships Carly Giltrap has the challenge of dealing with differing viewpoints in the large area she covers.

“Within looking over a region that has a lot of complexity, Asia and A/NZ [Australia and New Zealand], there are a variety of different needs for those regions to be successful,” she told ARN.

For Giltrap the things that keep her up at night “aren’t a hair-on-fire situation” but more about the main things that needed to be focused of success.

“Within partnerships, there’s many different streams that you can go after, but I think it’s really about how we can engage in certain markets that have cultural nuances that we need to think about how we approach them differently,” she said.

As the vendor expands in the region, particularly into Asia, Giltrap said questions about the “big rocks” it wants to “attack”, tracking success, and how its tracking on that as a go to market strategy.

“It’s the endless to do list of things that are top of mind to be successful, as we go into a region which has a lot of complexity and diversity,” she added.

Confluent A/NZ regional director Simon Laskaj is worried that, despite the company’s achievements, it is not doing enough.

“While we have great coverage across some partners … we can do so much more,” he told ARN. “Often we sit within an engineering tenant or a development tenant within the partners, and certainly some of the bigger partners, but we just don’t have the bandwidth to get across the various different client directors of different verticals.”

Partners like Capgemini, Accenture or Deloitte, for example, have a lot of “influential people own verticals and own customer relationships”, noted Laskaj.

“If you don’t have an army of people on the street that are pounding the door, having those repetitive tech conversations with partners and different people within the partners, you’re only touching a very small surface of the potential. I think we’ve just scratched the potential of what we should be doing with partners,” he said.

This then comes to the age-old issue of not having nearly enough resources, Laskaj said.

I came from AWS [Amazon Web Services], where they’ve got an army of … partner success managers and even they struggle to scratch the surface a lot of the time. So, we just aren’t thinking big enough, or more specifically, we aren’t able to go big enough with partners without being a lot more deliberate,” he said.

“That requires resourcing as well.”