Road to APC: Mexia leads the digital dance for enterprise transformation

The calibre of companies which have been named as finalists in the Microsoft Australia Partner Awards (MAPA) has never been higher. These are businesses that are deeply engaged in the digital transformation initiatives of their customers, and are contributing more broadly to the innovation fabric of Australia.

In this story we meet Mexia, who are a finalist in multiple categories of MAPA 2016 recognising Excellence in Managed Service, Excellence in Regional Area Customers, and Excellence in Technology Solutions Specialisation.

Most enterprises today are quick-stepping toward digital transformation. They are leveraging technologies – particularly cloud computing - to enter new markets, offer new services, and do everything better, faster, cheaper. Mexia’s their transformation dance partner.

Founder and CEO Dean Robertson’s always been a bit of an integration guru – taking on difficult technical challenges and delivering efficient solutions. He was always in demand, everyone wanted his skills, integration was hot. To meet that rising demand he and partner Mathew Coleman, have developed Mexia to focus on the burgeoning enterprise integration issue.

The Mexia team is focussed on serving the needs of enterprise scale businesses that already have invested heavily in on-premise line-of-business platforms – but which still need to leverage the cloud to roll out new consumer facing solutions, or to support a mobile and flexible workforce. They still need access to the data and platforms that they already have – but need to move forward faster.

Robertson explains; “It’s a big problem our customers have – they need to go on this digital transformation journey and be more innovative and agile and respond to customer needs quicker, but they don’t want to have to spend $30 million to replace their IT systems. We enable that, bridge that gap and provide them the agility that they need.

“We are enabling digital transformation. Helping enterprise customers.

“It is integration but it’s integration and everything that is attached to that - it’s identity and security, it’s application development, infrastructure management, application lifecycle management. It’s the ecosystem to deliver IT solutions that support large enterprises on a digital transformation journey.”

The company is a “Microsoft-first” business says Robertson, noting that Microsoft is the only major global vendor with the ability to run enterprise workload both in the cloud and on premises.

“Microsoft is one ecosystem, one Visual Studio, one application platform, one partnership relationship. It’s just simple doing business with Microsoft and the whole technology stack does stand across all the places that we like to play.” Robertson says that robust technology foundation is enhanced by Mexia’s highly experienced and skilful team of consultants that is “potent” and focussed on getting quick, high quality results.

“We are a highly concentrated consultancy and you need to dilute us down to slow us down. You get results a lot quicker than you could with a much larger consultancy. And that’s a challenge for us - to stay nimble - because as we grow every business knows you slow down – we don’t want to do that.”

With just over 40 staff spread between Brisbane and Melbourne, the company has recently opened a Sydney office and expects to grow significantly over the next 12-18 months as it responds to the demand for enterprise digital transformation. Growth has been strong and the company has featured on BRW’s Fast 100 list for the last three years and also been named as one of Australia’s best places to work.

Robertson will rely on his team, as it grows, to maintain Mexia’s potent culture and continue to deliver the quality solutions the company is known for.

But just as Mexia demands much from its staff, it expects certain things from its clients.

"We won’t get started on a project until we are very clear that the customer has bought into the way we work and what needs to be achieved and we have a very clear definition of success with every engagement. We expect the customer to partner with us and not treat us like body-shop vendor

“The customers that are prepared to work with us and trust in us and partner with us, and actually allow us to lead the dance sometimes - those customers get the best and fastest results.”

Partners who are interested in attending the Australian Partner Conference can register here.