Published on the 28/06/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Cloud-only consulting business PrimeQ is so confident of demand across Australia and New Zealand that it is planning to double headcount to 100 by the end of the year, and 200 the following year…
What makes the growth plans even more ambitious is that PrimeQ has hitched its cart to just one cloud – Oracle’s. Chris Downie, chief technology officer and director of cloud services, may have some inside insight though as he was until late 2015 manager of applications presales for Oracle in Australia and New Zealand.
He said from that vantage point it was clear that most Oracle partners – even large ones like Oakton and RedRock were still on-premise centric. “But it was clear the market had shifted,” he said and along with a handful of other ex Oracle and partner staffers, Downie founded PrimeQ which he believes has a 12-18 month head start as a cloud-only solutions provider.
Oracle ANZ however is no longer the company that Downie left with the company now seeking a replacement for former managing director Tim Ebbeck.
Nevertheless according to technology analyst Gartner the cloud transition is well underway and it has forecast that by 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy is today.
Downie said that the trigger for many organisations moving to the cloud was end of life of existing in house platforms, or a fundamental change in business requirements. “The main one is being locked into an old version and realizing it will be expensive to update. The shift to the cloud is quicker.”
For ERP users he said that the cloud had made solutions more affordable and easier to implement and update. Once on the cloud updating was automatic with vendors pushing out new version of the product rather than tying ERP users to “long winded expensive upgrade processes like a hamster on a wheel.”
Implementation could also be faster he said. Downie said that a project currently underway for a local council with 500 users will see the transition to the cloud completed between June and September while an on premises overhaul of the platform could have taken 12 months.
PrimeQ is also eating its dogfood and deployed an Oracle cloud solution to manage the business. Downie said that it planned to trial new developments in house before rolling out to customers.
With offices in Adelaide and Melbourne, and presence in Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland, the currently 50-person business has also set up development centres where it can tailor solutions for clients, and write add on modules where required using Oracle’s platform as a service.
