Credit: Photo 10045519 © Bernard Zajac - Dreamstime.com
The 'ARN spotlight on' series explores partners operating in the local channel landscape right around the country, from Cape York to Hobart, Byron Bay to Fremantle and beyond. In this edition, we focus on Queensland and Albion-based partner Envisage Technology.
Changing with the times
For a business to be successful in the long run, it needs to adapt to change. That’s exactly how the managed service provider (MSP) Envisage Technology found its success.
Envisage’s story started in 1998 with founder and managing director Ben Steel, who saw an opportunity to deliver custom desktop hardware to consumers. In this early stage, Steel was competing with larger retail vendors with lower overheads and direct access to components from import channels.
The MSP eventually changed tack and moved into the consulting space, being an early adopter of the managed services recurring revenue model, according to Steel.
“Since then we have constantly reinvented the way we do business to keep in line with customer trends,” he told ARN.
Today, the 15-employee-strong provider is focused on the healthcare industry, providing services for a large number of clients.
“It’s a tough industry that has pushed us on how we manage data, deliver uptime and ensure a consistent experience,” Steel said.
“We are growing our client base in other domains now and the healthcare experience has been invaluable as a high base line of performance.”
Envisage’s success can also be seen in the MSP’s financial results, reaching a compound annual growth rate of 25 per cent over the last five years. Steel said that this growth represented how Envisage is “always planning the next leap and not getting caught out by the growth we’re achieving”.
The ups and downs
Along the way, Envisage has had its fair share of wins, such as partnering with vendors NextDC, Over the Wire, Microsoft, Genie Solutions and working with XIT Distribution, Ingram Micro, Synnex and Dicker Data. However, one major win the MSP saw started out as a loss.
In 2015, Envisage lost out on a deal to move a virtual practice management company into the cloud, virtualising 30 medical practices with a couple of hundred users.
After a few months, the client reached out to the MSP and told them the project was moving too slowly, Steel recounted.
“They gave us a small migration, a four-user practice, to see if we could leap the technical barriers faster,” he said.
“We managed to quickly learn (sometimes through failure) how to solve the technical issues that multi-tenanting the software caused, as well as the integrations with peripherals and supporting tools that needed to be rebuilt in the cloud environment.
“The client gave us the rest of their practices to migrate and we now have a reputation for providing a stable cloud environment for practice management tools.”
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