Noel Simpson (Lexel Systems)
Short-to-medium term growth is on the cards for Lexel Systems, with ambitions to ramp up its services offerings and staff development.
This is according to Noel Simpson, the ICT services and solutions provider’s CEO, who said in regards to staff, it's a matter of maturing and optimising what Lexel's team does and how it does it.
“In terms of our team, it's a focus on developing our staff as much as maturing and optimising what we do and how we do it,” Simpson said to Reseller News.
“To support our growth, we have invested significantly in marketing and stronger product development – both in new and optimising existing solutions.”
Simpson identified two key priorities for the next two quarters — expand its managed data (SQL) capability and to continue building out its PowerBI (Reporting/PowerApp) expertise.
“These are critical to support our growing focus on the mid-market – those businesses that sit between ‘enterprise’ and ‘SME’ [small- to medium-sized enterprise] that have been traditionally underserved by the industry,” Simpson said.
Lexel is also including more integrated security as part of standard managed offerings, reflecting a recognition that many organisations are living with "major" security gaps, existing either through a perception that a cost-effective solution is unattainable or simply not knowing that the gap is there.
“Rather than putting a sticking plaster on the symptom we are able to work to a more permanent long-term solution for our customers, typically leveraging our standards,” Simpson said.
“It means we are able to be far more valuable as a partner, and also gives organisations and their boards, much greater surety they are investing in the right solution and have the right partner to guide and support them.”
In particular, Lexel is seeing a continued focus on moving core infrastructure to the cloud, including "ground up" builds and organisation refocus.
The move to hybrid models of working has accelerated this need for cloud migrations, “including making prior temporary solutions permanent, robust, scalable, secure and efficient,” Simpson said.
On the challenges being faced to achieve these growth ambitions, Simpson reflected the general tech sector’s biggest challenge: talent acquisition and retention.
However, Simpson sees this as a challenge that also brings market opportunity to be harnessed.
“Most customers are facing the same challenge, and many are looking for partners to take that pain away,” he said.
“The talent shortage is likely to continue for some time, be that hiring or retaining – particularly in areas requiring specialist technical skills or product knowledge.”
As organisations across New Zealand struggle to fill ICT services-related vacancies, Lexel sees an opportunity to partner with these organisations to help them fill these gaps. In particular, the mid-market space does not necessarily see the scale to provide such services consistently.
“We are able to provide people resources or outsourced project delivery, training and support,” Simpson said.
“Many customers are looking for an established partner with a proven record to work with, which Lexel is very well positioned for.
“Organisations are looking to outsource the ICT challenges they aren’t currently able to address internally or looking to implement projects that will make their operations more efficient.”
Simpson hopes that having such proximity to the market will set the business up for post-pandemic success as a "trusted advisor".
“I believe the most successful tech providers are the ones which know their market and build a repeatable set of deliverables which meets that market’s need,” he said.
“Those which rely upon specialist individuals for delivery will struggle to scale that in this tight labour market and will be extra exposed to the high levels of wage inflation that we have right now.
“Clients are looking for more of a turnkey solution to their core ICT systems and are more focused on the business outcomes than the detail of the technology. When that fully occurs, ICT process becomes as important as the technology."
Growth for Lexel involves a focus on both customer retention and acquisition, according to Simpson.
“Investing in our current customers remains our number one focus,” Simpson said. “We are continuously working on new and innovative ways to add additional value across the board.”
A recent ramp-up of marketing capability has allowed Lexel to both strengthen its brand and source leads for organic company growth.
“In addition we have segmented our sales team to focus on key markets and created dedicated BDM [business development management] roles,” Simpson added.
