Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Tecala?

Takala, a quietly established Australian technology services provider, is hardly a household name. Yet, as the world of work has transformed, so has the relevance of expertise like theirs.

The company has been operating for almost a quarter of a century, but, as Managing Director Peter DeGunz puts it, remains a "tightly kept secret" since they "don't tend to sort of market ourselves too heavily." Nonetheless, Takala's track record reveals a deep experience in consulting and advisory services, focusing on helping clients create strategic roadmaps for technology investments stretching three to five years ahead.

DeGunz explained, "Our background is really consulting and advisory, that's where we came from, helping people create strategic roadmaps that plan technology investments into the future – normally looking sort of three to five years out and really ensuring that those technology plans are really, really closely aligned with the core business strategy and business objectives."

The company, now more than 100 people strong, has evolved significantly, developing a wide-ranging capability that covers private and public cloud services, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, disaster recovery and backup. "We deliver a range of capabilities across private and public cloud, so you know things like infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service solutions of course, and DR and backup," DeGunz said.

Takala also offers managed services from desktop support and network management to cloud and application support, as well as a suite of communication and security options. They pride themselves on "end to end managed services," supporting clients in Australia and globally, and mostly serve mid-sized, progressive companies with workforces of between 100 and 1,000 employees. "We have really close relationships with those clients and really long-term relationships, which is what we enjoy," DeGunz said.

The landscape for IT and business has shifted dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic, and Takala's expertise has become increasingly important as companies transition to flexible, distributed working. DeGunz reflected on this rapid evolution: "Modern workplace and these sorts of concepts... anywhere, on any device, at any time... it's been around for a long time, I think it's getting accelerated heavily with the assessment that companies are making on how to respond to COVID long term."

He noted that while business leaders look forward to a return to offices and normality, "there's also a recognition that there is a fundamental shift that's occurred in people's behaviours, their routines, their family lives, and their attitudes towards work." This, he said, makes it essential that technology plans now enable teams to work effectively, "anywhere in the world on any device."

Takala's approach includes making sure staff can "access their applications, access their data, get their job done at any location to the same calibre that they used to be able to do in the office." Client expectations for service and support quality remain high, regardless of where staff are based. The company's managed services division, for instance, ensures "support on a 24x7 basis."

Security has also become more complex and critical in this new environment. "From a security perspective again, you kind of had this assumption that people were in offices and you're trying to protect those offices... now really the thinking has to be I'm protecting my users, I'm protecting my data and my applications, and I'm protecting my devices even though they could be anywhere on the end of an internet connection," DeGunz explained.

The shift to a remote-first model has also required businesses to rethink how they support staff and protect company assets. Takala responded by bolstering governance, asset management, and compliance to "control over that machine, which is also important from a security perspective."

On the subject of managed services, Takala was recently recognised as Australia's number one MSP (Managed Service Provider). Asked what makes their offering stand out, DeGunz said, "The unifying piece is actually customer centricity, which sounds obvious but I think a lot of technology companies get carried away with the technology side of things and are not as focused on the user as I believe that we are."

He highlighted that customer focus is "how we set our strategies, it's how we make our decisions, how we've made our investments over the decades." This focus is embedded in the culture, with teams understanding "the power of customer centricity and customer service" and "the role that their job plays in actually supporting our customers achieving their goal."

Another fundamental choice for Takala has been to remain a wholly Australian operation, bucking the industry trend of sending work offshore. "We made a very, very conscious decision to remain 100% Australian operation," DeGunz explained. "We believe it delivers a higher grade of service, higher responsiveness, higher quality." He added that fostering local talent is vital if Australia is to remain competitive globally.

Takala boasts a Net Promoter Score in the 60s and 70s, among the highest in the country. DeGunz attributes this to "a really broad degree of capability and skills and maturity and experience," but more so to the way Takala takes pains to understand each client's business from the outset. He said, "The thing that really differentiates us is actually how much we invest in actually understanding their business from the word go and that's the feedback that we've had from clients as to why they chose us."

The client relationship, he stressed, is not something static but improved through ongoing attention. "It's something you really have to prove. So that is something that is once we engage... the accountability, ownership that our team takes... when there's projects being delivered or in some cases when something goes wrong, you know what we do about that, how we step in and how we make sure that's never going to happen again, I think that's important from a taking ownership perspective," he said.

DeGunz is keen for prospective clients not only to see Takala as a service provider, but as a partner interested in truly understanding their needs. "Sort of initial discovery session is key. So I would recommend to anybody who's kind of thinking about talking to us or even just needs a bit of advice and opinion on what's going on in their business or they're thinking about building a strategy, reach out and book one of those sort of things. It's really just designed to get to know the client, for them to get to know a little bit about us," he said.

Wrapping up, DeGunz made a simple invitation for businesses wrestling with the modern challenges of IT and digital transformation: "We're very happy to come and have a chat and we know that as soon as they know about us, in the future when they do need to talk to us, they're welcome to bring us back in... we're very philosophical about that."