Arinco appoints Dean Oelkers as Queensland Sales Manager

Arinco has appointed Dean Oelkers as its new Queensland Sales Manager to support its ongoing growth in the Brisbane market.

In his new role, Dean Oelkers will be responsible for engaging new customers and strengthening relationships with commercial organisations, local government agencies, and the Microsoft team across Queensland. This move is part of Arinco's plan to build on the progress it has experienced in the state over the past year.

Experienced leader

Dean Oelkers brings more than 30 years of experience in the IT sector, having held positions in enterprise account management, solution architecture, and professional services leadership. He spent over two decades with Avanade, a global Microsoft partner, where he worked on digital transformation programmes for clients spanning government, healthcare, higher education, and commercial sectors. Most recently, Dean worked as an Enterprise Account Manager at ThoughtWorks.

Commenting on his appointment, Dean Oelkers said, "It's a great opportunity to be joining Arinco at such an exciting stage of its growth. Queensland organisations are accelerating their adoption of AI, security and cloud technologies, and I look forward to working with our talented local team and Microsoft to help customers modernise, innovate and achieve greater impact."

Growth in Queensland

Arinco currently has a team of approximately 20 consultants based in Queensland and has reported significant growth in the region over the past year. This growth reflects increasing demand for AI, cloud, and security services among both public and private sector clients, according to the company.

One example of Arinco's activity in the local market is its partnership with Brighter Super, a Brisbane-based superannuation fund managing more than AUD $34 billion on behalf of over 280,000 members.

Brighter Super engaged Arinco to improve its Azure Databricks data platform, which was facing high operational costs, slow processing times, and challenges with onboarding new data sources.

Through collaboration with Arinco, Brighter Super achieved a 90% reduction in costs, a 50% improvement in performance, and the removal of 8,000 lines of unnecessary code, which has enabled the fund to establish a more scalable and sustainable platform for its long-term operations.

"Partnering with Arinco has helped Brighter Super manage platform costs with an efficient, low-code ingestion framework, allowing a small team to easily monitor, maintain and onboard new data sources," said Lina Dickens, Head of Data Analytics and Performance at Brighter Super.

Leadership perspective

Chris Padgett, CEO at Arinco, welcomed Dean Oelkers to the senior leadership team, stating, "We are delighted to welcome Dean to lead our Queensland sales efforts. His track record of building trusted relationships and delivering value in complex enterprise environments makes him an excellent fit for Arinco."

"With demand for specialist AI, security and cloud expertise accelerating across the state, Dean's leadership will ensure we are well positioned to support our customers."

Dean Oelkers' appointment further demonstrates Arinco's commitment to investing in Queensland and supporting the needs of local organisations and government agencies as they advance their use of Microsoft Azure and adapt to new ways of working.