AWS and Oracle partner Syntax is latching onto cloud’s rapid adoption, achieving record growth and expanding its global footprint two months after a $300 million funding injection.
“The key driver [for growth] is that there’s a definite need, from a customer community standpoint, to take advantage of all the innovation coming from companies like AWS,” Christian Primeau, global CEO of the Montreal-based provider of managed services for multi-cloud and multi-ERP application deployments, told CRN. “The pace of innovation of these guys is amazing. It’s something that we’ve never ever seen in the industry. And the customer’s ability to consume that pace of innovation and the ability for customers to get the right expertise and recruit and maintain that kind of expertise is extremely difficult.
In October, the member of the Elite 150 in CRN’s 2021 Managed Service Provider 500 list secured a $300 million investment from Canadian private equity firm Novacap. Backed with funds by Goldman Sachs, Novacap made the capital investment to support Syntax’s continued growth. CRN reached out to Novacap for comment.
“I’ll use a dirty word, outsourcing, but that’s what we are for our customer,” he added. “We’re helping them in putting in place that strong innovation and allowing them to operate in innovation.”
He said as AWS keeps innovating and bringing new capabilities to the market, Syntax consumes that innovation into their own automation layer and framework and puts it to work on the most mission critical applications for the customer.
Syntax, which said it achieved 1,500 percent growth over the past five years, also recently achieved Premier Partner status in the AWS Partner Network by demonstrating expertise and notable success in helping customers design, architect, build, migrate and manage their workloads on AWS.https://d80aee32c4de186467f3a85df7da4a2e.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
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Primeau said there are about 75,000 customers that are looking for the right partner to help them take their investment in business application, bring it into the public cloud and take full advantage of that hyper innovation.
“It will not only give expanded and accelerated digital capabilities to existing application portfolio, but also positioning them well to go in and take on the next steps that they would want to go after,” he said.
As for the $300 million investment, Syntax will continue to invest in its talent pool, intellectual property, its software capabilities and to expand organically.
“We continue to be very active on the M&A front,” he said. “We will continue building and acquiring capabilities in the market to be more for our customer and continue expanding our footprint and being their trusted partner of choice.”
But adding capabilities to its stack becomes a challenge as the company, like so many others, is having issues hiring and retaining talent.
“If you meet someone that does not tell you that talent acquisition, talent retention and talent development is one of the key challenges that we‘re all facing right now…please let me know,” he said. “It’s probably one of the companies would want to go and buy, or they’re lying to you.
“For the first time in history of IT, probably every single company is going after the same type of skill set,” he added. “We‘re going after the DevOps type of skill set for our own internal needs for automation. We’re doing this for consulting services for our customer, and our customer themselves are going after that kind of talent to be able to solve some of the internal challenges that they have.”
Funds from the investment will also go towards its Syntax Academy, the company’s own “university” where it offers training for individuals early on in their career, he said.
But going forward, Primeau said Syntax will continue with and accelerate mission critical workloads and move them to the cloud.
“We saw COVID strongly accelerate what was kind of a 911-type of workload, like virtual desktops,” he said. “Now I think customers realize the benefit of hyper innovation that they can take on.”RELATED TOPICS:
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