Octane turned 3 this year and to put icing on the cake Octane just attained the status of IBM Gold Business Partner. Sounds a bit of founder’s cliche, however it really has been an extraordinary journey. It all started with a passion to fill a gap in the market. Biggest task though was building a team that is equally passionate and sold on the idea of transforming how a vendor could play a more strategic role in partnering with clients to shape their Data and Business Intelligence objectives to deliver actionable insights.
After having interacted with most of the vendors in this space over 15 years, as a client I could see an obvious gap in the market.
The vendor focus seemed to be sales driven – if only they could push the next license sale or “take care” of the next project seemed to be the key driver. Organisations craved for service providers who invested time in understanding their business and stayed devoted for the long run at a price point that made it sustainable for all parties.
After many months of research and discussions with numerous key-opinion-leaders from the industry, I resigned from Macquarie Group and decided to start Octane with a clear focus on how we would approach things differently. I am a firm believer that “luck” does play a substantial role in your success but then it only favors the brave. And I “did” get lucky as a sum of very respected consultants decided to join Octane (and continue to do so) and have contributed significantly towards building it up so far. As humble as a beginning could get in 2016, friends lent us office space in St Leonards in North of Sydney within walking distance from IBM. We promptly went about gaining our IBM partnership and spreading the word that we have arrived on the scene and ready to do business.
Slowly but surely, we started signing up clients (almost all of them continue to be with us to this day). As our business in Sydney settled in, we opened our first office in Bangalore, India by early 2017. As the business grew, Octane relocated to Sydney CBD. The next wave of expansion came with us:
As I ponder upon our short but an eventful journey so far, getting IBM Gold Partnership status is a manifestation of hard work from many in the Octane Family. It resonates well with our philosophy and in a way validates Octane’s success in the areas of Technology Competencies Achieved, Sales Success Delivered and Client Satisfaction Attained. We have a solid dedicated back office team that supports our consultants in the front line. Octane’s Managed Service offering has proven to be wildly successful where we provide an SLA based end to end support and development to our clients. The secret ingredient has been a combination of local onsite presence of our staff with best-in-class offshore development and support capabilities. This provides clients with a very attractive pricing structure with none of the risks associated with off- shoring yet ensuring consistent quality of skill set across time zones at all times.
As I pen this blog down, we are in process of setting up our operations in Fiji and Middle-East. Fiji is close to heart and we have been awarded a long term contract to transform and support Fiji Airways Performance Management applications. Our Middle-East journey is in its early stages and we hope to develop this into something bigger in coming months. We also celebrated one of clients Tyro through their successful IPO journey.
Focus has also been on developing new IP and broadening our scope into Business & Advance Analytics. On innovation front, we have developed a number of in-house capabilities to conduct rapid health checks and also recently launched DataFusion- a data connector which connects TM1 applications to other leading BI & Dashboarding tools such as Power BI, Qlik and Tableau.
I can say confidently, THE JOURNEY HAS JUST BEGUN.