As the chief operating office of a small business, eB2Bcom’s Adam Neale is highly familiar with the challenges facing entrepreneurs in this day and age.

The Melbourne-headquartered software master reseller works with innovative software vendors from around the world, meaning that they are also dealing with fellow business starters who are seeking to pave their way in the industry.

“We’re best-described as a value-added distributor of specialist IT products or software and are primarily focused on identity management and security solutions,” Neale said.
“This means that we represent leading-edge solutions that are just emerging in their home market of the US or Europe. We also have a number of vendors we have represented for five or six years, and have become quite established in their fields.

“So our model is to represent them here in the Asia Pacific, establish the local market for them, and build it up. Sometimes, they are acquired by larger companies; other times, they set up operations in the region, so we continue a transitional plan while they’re setting up.”

The solutions offered by eB2Bcom include the current “hot” areas of the IT industry, such as identity and access management; entitlements management solutions; single sign-on and access and security technologies for the Cloud; identity auditing and reporting, and directory solutions. One of the latest areas of focus has been on allowing organisations to leverage social media identities, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, for access to external facing or cloud-based applications.

In particular, eB2Bcom has extensive experience delivering specific identity and access management solutions to the Defence, Health, and Government industries.

Products currently provided by eB2Bcom include Centrify, PingFederate, SecureAuth, Telos and ViewDS , which have also been supplied to an established customer list of blue chip corporate, government and telecommunications organisations.

According to Neale, the company is often approached by international suppliers seeking an Asia Pacific partner, but rejects the majority in order to maintain the company’s high standards in quality and ensure that only best-of-breed products are in use.

“We’re set apart by our level of service and knowledge, plus the products we take to market – we take our role of representing our vendors in this part of the world very seriously,” he said.

“In order to play that role well, you need to have very good skills in those areas. It’s a specialist area too, so it’s not just something that anyone can do.

“We do have competitors, however they offer different vendors’ products so there’s nobody else who does exactly the same thing as what we do.

“We’re different to these companies by staying focused and basically bringing these single solutions to market, as opposed to being another reseller of a big suite like Oracle or IBM where you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of implementation – instead of doing that, we get a solution that just does what it does and can be in and out without within days or weeks.”

eB2Bcom’s head office is based in Kew, Melbourne, with an Asia Pacific bureau in Singapore. Additional support staff members are also located within Sydney, Brisbane and Hong Kong.

Despite the economic downturn over the past years, Neale said the key to success and continuing growth was good money management.

“As a small business, it comes down to cash flow – whatever you spend has to be affordable, based on the income you’ve got coming in,” he said.

“If you have to borrow heavily in order to expand, then you’re rolling the dice and gambling that the business will be there within a short time frame to cover the debts.

“We have been very careful to grow responsibly and making sure that we do have work coming in before growing the business – we’re certainly more cautious than we were five years ago, when money was less tight.”

A second focus of eB2Bcom is increasing awareness of its own brand and growing its presence in the public eye.

Neale said self-promotion was one of the biggest challenges the company faced, and was working to build awareness of the brand and the products it promotes.

“With our business, one of the biggest challenges is building a visible presence, as we’re selling products which aren’t as established in the market,” he said.

“These brands haven’t historically invested in Australia and aren’t spending their own money on creating brand awareness, so we’re often going up against a name brand.

“Sometimes, the customer has never heard of us or the vendor we’re representing, so it does take some very good sale skills to get in the door and get revenue out of it.”