GlobalOne CEO David Northington spoke to the WHIR about the acquisition of Weblinc
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Two out of the three past acquisitions by cloud services firm GlobalOne have been of Australia-based companies, signaling an opportunity for growth in the Asia Pacific region for cloud providers, a market that CEO David Northington says is hungry for cloud services.
Announced on Tuesday, GlobalOne’s acquisition of cloud computing application provider Weblinc is its most recent move on the Australian market. Weblinc, a Salesforce.com partner with technical architect certification, brings with it a strong client base, senior architecture talent, and cloud application blueprints and templates to broaden GlobalOne’s ability to build and deploy enterprise cloud applications.
“Australia has a very solid economy at the present time and quite an appetite for cloud computing,” Northington says in a phone interview with the WHIR. “Companies there are advancing quickly in the space and yet the partners that are there to serve that market are not terribly significant. There are some very large companies that are playing in the space but being a large company doesn’t necessarily equate to having a large number of qualified resources.”
With existing offices in Brisbane and Sydney, Weblinc is already operating in some of the same markets in which GlobalOne has a foothold, and Northington says this provides an opportunity for GlobalOne to start expanding rapidly in Brisbane, as well as Sydney and Melbourne, where it has existing offices.
“There’s almost a 100 percent synergy and virtually no overlap with this acquisition,” Northington says. “Even though we’re in the same cities we were both expanding rapidly in those cities so we’ll immediately combine our organizations into common office space. We’ve set up a leadership structure that places focus on the three cities. The Weblinc group will become totally integrated into GlobalOne almost immediately.”
While GlobalOne has been focused largely on serving the finanical services and the service industries, Weblinc has a focus on manufacturing and construction clients. With the acquisition, Northington says GlobalOne will have more than 30 clients combined and “many of them quite large, very recognizable names in the Australian market.”
Northington says that, while GlobalOne was looking for a good cultural fit with the acquisition, what it was really after was focus on clients, client delivery, and placing a high degree of value on making sure clients are satisfied with the services they receive. Despite all of this, Northington kept coming back to one word: architecture.
“Architecture clearly plays into it because they have a heavy focus on cell phone architecture and bring a number of blueprints, technical components and technical concepts that work nicely with our solutions and the things that we’re doing,” he says. “We think this global architecture practice will make a lot of sense to combine the efforts of the two firms in that space and really reach out and take a leading role in areas of the Salesforce.com architecture.”
“We were also looking for a company that was focused on attracting and retaining superior talent in the marketplace because that’s our focus. Weblinc has the same focus and they have a team of highly talented individuals so the two teams are already meshing together really nicely and complementing each other.”
In December 2011, GlobalOne brought a mobility group from Vodafone to the company to add a technical and architectural focus. Northington says that many clients are interested in taking their Salesforce.com solution and placing the pieces on mobile applications.
Most mid-size to large enterprises are integrating Salesforce.com into their existing architecture, Northington says, so integrators are important to this process, but so is the mobile and social capability. Weblinc will help to make sure the proper architecture is in place for mobile applications, he says.
“Placing those applications on mobile devices has to be a very positive experience for users that are used to a quality Salesforce.com application on their desktop or laptop when they go to their iPhone or their Android phone they’re expecting the same or better user experience,” Northington says.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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