2020: A year for the bold to prosper from fundamental technology change

Sydney, Australia – January 23, 2020: Ethan Group, one of Australia’s leading technology and communications service providers, is predicting there will be fundamental changes to the way Australian organisations use technology in 2020. 

Paul Kawtal, Ethan Group chief executive officer, will outline his opinion about the major trends in the Australian technology and telecommunications sector, in a LinkedIn post. In the post, Mr Kawtal says that for the first time, a wide range of organisations will choose to work with a single service provider to aggregate traditionally disparate services, including IT, telecommunications, security, Cloud and more. 

“This is a major shift and it will result in significant productivity and competitive benefits for those organisations who adopt this approach. It will also result in a significant shake out of the technology industry. In fact, this trend has already begun. We are already seeing some organisations reducing the number of suppliers or service providers they partner with, to remove the cost, time and wasted resources so often associated with dealing with too many providers. But the accelerator will be pressed this year. And it won’t slow down. 

And the pay offs from this new way of consuming technology, are huge. Not only does it enable customers to save time and money from having to manage relationships with many providers, who don’t understand the entire IT stack. It also enables organisations to free up resources to focus on what matters most – providing their workforces with real time access to mission critical applications, regardless of where those staff are located. If you think of an example of a company, which has a hub and spoke operational model across major cities and regions, the ability to work with a service provider partner who can remove the friction of designing, deploying, managing and paying large capital expenses for these services, the benefits are potentially enormous.

What has enabled this trend? A key factor has been the emergence in the past few years of the NBN as a business grade network platform. The Ethan Group believes the NBN will be a game changer for businesses in Australia because it means differentiation of access provision is no longer a major issue in the Australian market. People underestimate the importance of this. The traditional monopolistic access to high speed bandwidth has subsided with the arrival of the NBN and as a result, significant barriers to entry have been dramatically reduced – new players can provide access to very high speed, dynamically provisioned networking, and offer IT, Cloud and more on top of it. Customers will have more choice of service providers and the telecommunications playing field will become more even. The result? Customers are no longer shackled to legacy, old world technology provision and they have better access to feature rich applications across their entire organisations, including all remote locations.

But to maximise the benefits of this new network environment, service providers will need to understand how to manage the applications which travel across the network and vitally, how to provide their customers with management layer services, like 24/7 service desks, for example. Not many service providers can offer the kind of single threaded, supplier agnostic approach required to maximise the benefits of this new landscape for customers. Many will get it wrong. And this is where the shakeout will come in the technology industry. As customers increasingly choose to adopt this model, some players, who haven’t invested the capital, time and resources to provide it, will suffer from a breach of customer trust. Others, who have long histories of providing solutions across the entire IT stack, like Ethan Group, will prosper. This is new territory for the Australian IT industry and not everyone will get it right. Integrating and aggregating Cloud, wide area networking, procurement, security and software management with a dynamically provisioned telecommunications environment is not something many services can or will be able to do. Far seeing organisations know this and have been preparing for it. 2020 will be the year when the rubber hits the road. It will indeed be a year for the bold and it will have profound implications for the Australian technology industry, not unlike the way PayPal has disrupted banking, Airbnb the hotel industry and Tesla the car industry.” 

Paul Kawtal is the Chief Executive Officer of Ethan Group.

For media interviews or additional information please contact:

Peter Witts

Director of Technology, Sydney

Navigate Communication

Ph _+61477274412

peter@navigatecommunication.com.au