Tech Project Group: The Founding Story

Tech Project Group, a company which was founded in 2012, has spent over A$5m and 5 years developing a platform which simplifies the complexity of the industry systems that support cloud telephony.

How and why did the company get started?

The Founders were active in the Managed Service Provider sector and reacting to the extreme shift in SMB computing when customers moved from having Microsoft applications installed inhouse to being supplied on a SaaS basis as Office365 which then created mass adoption of SaaS with applications like Xero.

The  Founders correctly anticipated that the global trends of IoT enabled devices, subscription-based IT and cloud computing would converge As more and more devices are connected to the internet and sold as a subscription, the role of Managed Service Providers in configuring, provisioning, billing and supporting these solutions inevitably becomes unfeasibly labour intensive and costly.

Cloud based computing created the opportunity to automate, many of these processes and support them remotely, reducing the implied time, labour, and cost requirements to deliver these solutions in the new environment.

What is the background of the Founders and where did they see this opportunity arise?

Tech Project’s core development team are the same team behind ASX juggernaut, NextDC Limited (ASX: NXT), and the development of ONEDC (NextDC’s disruptive data centre management software). In identifying the global trends I mentioned earlier, this team split from Next DC, created a somewhat traditional MSP called Tech Project, to contract professional services back to NextDC and other company’s associated with Bevan Slattery to fund the development of MSPCube and use it an inhouse testbed.

What are the future goals of the company?

The immediate goal of the Company is to achieve a proof point in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore in partnership with Alcatel Lucent Enterprise (ALE) by enabling MSPs to provision cloud telephony on a “Handset as a Service” basis. Doing so successfully will underwrite expansion into APAC and Europe in partnership with ALE.

Ultimately Tech Project intends to expand beyond cloud telephony into multiple IT verticals to make MSPCube a singular interface for MSPs and vendors to provision all the IT hardware and software requirements of an end user and manage the licensing and billing, which is currently causing significant pain in the IT world particularly for the SMB sector that lacks inhouse IT departments.

What is your intention with the funds generated from the latest raise?

The raise will be used to crystallise existing sales within the pipeline, hire a CEO and expand sales and marketing resources to manage the company’s domestic and international expansion. Additionally there are many opportunities to build connectors to SaaS and IoT vendors to further automate MSPCube as the logical connecting point.

About Tech Project Group

Tech Project Group has spent over A$5m and 5 years developing a platform which simplifies the complexity of the industry systems that support cloud telephony. Having reached proven viability of this solution, as evidenced by the number of customers and the sign on of major distribution partners, Tech Project is poised to become a global company of scale in a very large sector backed by industry heavyweight Alcatel Lucent.

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