Billion Dollar Businesses – Datacom | TIN – Technology Investment Network

How much does your current success feed back to your company's founding principles?

Our company values lie very much at the core of our success, which is fundamentally based around solving challenges and creating opportunities for our customers. Our purpose is to help organisations and communities to a better place by connecting people and technology. This underpins our constant focus on understanding what our customers need and then working with them to deliver to those needs.

What have been the three key elements of your success to date?

How did you first approach international expansion?

Our initial expansion was driven by our customers. We moved into Australia in 1994 and have now built our Australian operation to over 3,000 people delivering a wide range of technology services to major corporates, government organisations (federal, state and local) and smaller businesses. And it is our customers again who have driven our expansion beyond Australia and New Zealand, with growing numbers of staff based in Datacom offices in Malaysia, Singapore, the US and UK.

How have you been able to manage globalisation from NZ? What are the advantages of being based in New Zealand?

Getting the right local leadership in each of our offshore locations has been critical. We have highly capable leaders with deep local knowledge who embody our values-based approach to business. Across the organisation, we are constantly working to enable flexible delivery models for our customers that combine experienced local delivery (often onsite, side by side with our customers) with deep specialist skills from other locations when needed.

In terms of advantages, being based in New Zealand has allowed us to successfully build a very broad-based business which would have been more difficult in a larger market, and as we have expanded into Australia and beyond, we are finding this breadth of capability is quite unique and increasingly sought after by our customers.

What have you got your sights set on next?

Our vision is to be sought after by organisations to explore new possibilities and solve their greatest challenges. A big focus for us is to help our customers bridge the gap between organisational strategy and technology delivery. To this end, we believe that our combination of advisory consulting, design and implementation capability, through to ongoing operational management services sets us apart in helping our customers select, design, build and manage technology platforms that work, and deliver what they need into the future.