For Datacom, 2024 has been a year of transformation and resilience — both for our business and the customers we work with.
We made significant progress with our ‘Beyond’ transformation strategy, ensuring Datacom is better positioned than ever to innovate, grow and support our customers’ changing needs.
In 2025 it will be 60 years since Datacom began as a small computer services and software company. The positive legacy of our decades-long evolution is our experience and expertise, our broad technical capabilities and our reputation with the hundreds of organisations we’ve helped.
Our evolution had also seen us grow into a complex business with 50+ service lines and over the course of this year we have worked to create a simpler, easier-to-navigate model around five core business areas – our Professional Services, Managed Operations, Infrastructure Products, Product Solutions Group (PSG) and our SaaS products businesses.
This model gives our teams a strong foundation to deliver the efficiencies and growth that our customers are looking to technology to provide – whether that comes from AI and automation, the right SaaS product, extracting more value from cloud and applications, or from strategic decisions about outsourcing or data centres.
Our business has seen a growing demand for AI consulting and solutions, driven by organisations eager to unlock its potential responsibly, and our teams have responded in a number of ways including sharing insights and research, identifying use cases and creating solutions that directly respond to customer challenges, such as never before seen levels of automation of customer service, revolutionising the modernisation of older applications and developing tools such as the Enterprise AI Assistant.
Our partnerships with global technology businesses and solution providers continue to deliver real value for our customers, while our locally-developed solutions and SaaS products answer the very specific needs in areas such as local government and payroll.
Looking ahead, technology’s role in boosting economic growth has never been clearer.
In Australia, technology is expected to contribute a predicted A$250 billion to the Australian economy by 2030. Recent research from Tech Council Australia has also calculated that increasing tech investment to 4.6% as a share of GDP could contribute an additional $89.3 billion to GDP in productivity gains by 2035.
In New Zealand, despite the global headwinds, the results of the 2024 TIN Report show a resilient tech sector, with TIN200 revenue reaching $17.95B – a 7.7% increase. Datacom itself continues to sit at the top end of the TIN200 rankings and in 2024 ranks at #4.
Harnessing these growth opportunities and turning them into tangible results will, as it always does, come down to the talented people who work in our tech businesses and wider tech sector. Our people continue to be Datacom’s greatest strength, and it will be our team and our leaders – including our recently appointed Managing Director for Datacom Australia, Laura Malcolm – who will help us deliver on these opportunities for our customers and for the countries we operate in.
Opportunities and challenges are often flipsides of the same coin, so as we look to reap the benefits of automation and AI, we must make sure we have the right guardrails, policies and infrastructure in place. Datacom’s ongoing investment in data centre infrastructure, connectivity and security, for example, stands us – and our customers – in good stead as generative AI fuels data centre demand.
We are entering 2025 as a refreshed, agile business, ready to help our customers solve their challenges and extract real value from existing and emerging technologies.
