“You get to define your culture from day one. Then you get to bring people in that really match that culture first and foremost. That’s one of the best things about starting your own business."
The words of Nuago co-founder and director of sales, Connor O’Rourke, speaking to ARN 90 days after launching South Australia's newest born-in-the-cloud provider.
In the three months since the Adelaide-based business set up shop, the new company has been working on building the business from the inside out, with all five co-founders drawing on lessons learnt from their days at system integrator, Datacom.
"We all have different experiences from different backgrounds and we're thankful for our time at Datacom because we all learned things there," O’Rourke said.
"But our organisation is uniquely Nuago in the people we have brought together to work here.
"We wanted to take an approach where we didn’t seem like a rigid Silicon Valley startup that was systems or technology because for us, it’s all about why.
"Why are you trying to achieve a particular outcome as a business? We want to deliver an outcome as opposed to a hardware project.”
Physically reflected by the office’s open floor plan, O’Rourke said through its customer-centric attitude, Nuago looks to embody its key value of being professional, yet flexible.
“We have a “no office” culture here because the culture of the environment we provide to the staff is incredibly important to onflow through to our customer base," he said.
"We want people to feel apart of the Nuago family when we take on management of their environment."
O’Rourke said Nuago’s key focus is based around user experience, with the company looking to progress purely based on feedback directly from the South Australian market.
"We're judging ourselves and building our contracts purely around end user satisfaction as opposed to being an SLA-driven company," he said.
"We hear a lot about these stringent, lock-in contracts that don’t allow for the true flexibility that businesses really require in a rapidly changing technology space.
"We see South Australia as quintessentially small to medium businesses and we want to provide more than just services. We want to offer an actual business in line with the needs of South Australian organisations."
Through targeting the mid-market, O’Rourke said Nuago fills "the consultancy gap" in the industry.
"Most businesses are targeting the larger end of town such as the South Australian government," he said.
"But we spotted a lack of consultancy and advice in that mid-market space in terms of helping businesses transform and move IT from being a line item on the profit and loss sheet, to being a real enabler for the business to move into new markets or drive optimisation to improve their own business."
For O’Rourke, being a born in the cloud business means the market is receiving Nuago’s key message as intended.
"There's a lot of legacy IT shops in Adelaide and no one was taking a pure cloud approach," he added.
"We want to approach cloud from not only public or private perspectives, but as a delivery mechanism also.
"It’s about the consumption base. We are seeing a different movement from build to consume.”
Set with one customer win - a new managed hybrid cloud client on a five-year contract - and seven more managed services opportunities in the pipeline, O’Rourke said Nuago is "aggressively hiring" to meet the wealth of business opportunity in the South Australian market.
In terms of growth, O’Rourke said the company will continue to keep adding the right people to the business.
"As businesses scale, it’s incredibly important that we maintain our culture and quality,” he explained.
"We want to have a big enough facility so that scaling isn't an issue for us. We also want to have enough cash in the bank so that running out of money isn’t going to be an issue as most startups fail because they run out of cash.”
With two additions to the Nuago team, rounding up a total of seven staff, O’Rourke said Nuago is on track to respond to the market demands.
Recently, Darryl Stovell joined the team from Sydney-based company, Ideacraft, where he specialised in large AWS cloud migrations.
Stovell joins Nuago as senior technical consultant, in charge of building, delivering and managing customer’s cloud environment.
"In a largely consultancy based role he will also be in charge of understanding the business outcomes the customer is looking to achieve and translate the appropriate technology,” O’Rourke added.
Another addition to the Naugo team is Ben Stratton, who joins the sales department from Telstra.
“The new people we are bringing on board will help fulfil the work we have won, so we are not necessarily investing ahead of the curve," he added. "It’s actually in line with need from the market.
"We are working some long hours at the moment, but are adding some great people to the business. We have a capacity for 45 to 50 people and we certainly plan on filling this building out."
