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Logicalis targets APAC’s mid-market with ‘GSI quality’ services
The global technology service provider is banking on its ‘think global, act local’ strategy, a deep focus on application modernisation and security to differentiate itself in the region
Global technology service provider Logicalis is doubling down on delivering high-end, consultative services to mid-market customers in Asia-Pacific (APAC), a region that has become its fastest-growing segment.
In doing so, the $2bn company, which has a footprint in 30 territories and nearly 8,000 employees worldwide, is building strong, local delivery capabilities, eschewing the common practice of using sales-only offices or offshore delivery centres to drive and support its business.
“Our approach has always been to serve domestic customers in all the markets we operate in, which is quite unique,” Logicalis’s global CEO, Bob Bailkoski, told Computer Weekly in a recent interview in Singapore.
“We have local technical expertise to deliver to local customers.”
Bailkoski said this “think global, act local” strategy allows customers to leverage the company’s global expertise to address local challenges.
“They like to have the ability to tap our brain power and gene pool around the globe to help solve specific problems in their territory,” he added.
Logicalis’s global footprint has also been a draw for major technology suppliers like Cisco, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks, which can roll out their offerings across international markets more efficiently through a single partner, said Bailkoski.
A GSI for the mid-market
While Logicalis has the ability to serve top-tier enterprises, its sweet spot, particularly in APAC, is in the mid-market. Lee Chong-Win, the company’s CEO for APAC, described the company’s value proposition as bringing the quality and consultative approach typically associated with global system integrators (GSIs) to a broader audience.
“You can think of us as a GSI-quality type of SI for everyone else,” he said. “We feel that every customer segment needs to have that kind of consulting-led, high-quality delivery and support services and managed offerings.”
Lee said conversations with mid-market customers often start with application modernisation, driven by the shift to a mobile, application-centric world. He added that a superior customer experience often begins with modern applications, which in turn requires the underlying infrastructure to be modernised.
“You can’t really enjoy the full benefits of a modernised app unless you modernise your infrastructure,” he said. “That’s where we help customers build the most fit-for-purpose hybrid cloud architecture so that they can scale fast.”
Logicalis’s GSI-quality services has attracted a number of prominent customers in APAC, including an Australian datacentre provider, a Singapore-based regional property giant, a Taiwanese contract manufacturer, as well as Chinese hyperscalers and electric vehicle makers as they expand across the region.
Cyber security opportunity
A key driver of Logicalis’s business is the onslaught of cyber attacks in APAC. Citing findings from the company’s annual global survey of IT leaders, Bailkoski noted that the region appears to be more vulnerable to cyber attacks than other territories. “Over 90% of our respondents from APAC said they had a cyber incident in the last 12 months, and around 45% said that they had multiple breaches,” he said.
Bailkoski noted that while customers have invested heavily in a range of specialised security products, they often lack holistic coverage, driving them to turn to security service providers to augment their capabilities. To address this need, Logicalis offers a suite of managed security services from its security operations centres in Singapore and Malaysia, which provide 24/7 coverage for the region.
Amid the industry-wide shortage of cyber security professionals, Logicalis has started building its own talent pipeline. “We take in a lot of fresh graduates and interns, and we train them,” said Lee. “It’s not sustainable if you’re always hiring from the market.”
In addition, the company is building its own AI-driven security tools, powered by domain-specific language models, to augment the capabilities of security analysts and guide junior analysts on how they can go about managing a security incident.
Lee said the move is aimed at democratising advanced security services for mid-market customers who may find the AI tools from top cyber security firms too expensive. “We wanted to build something that provides some level of autonomous analyst capability for customers that do not want to pay a premium,” he added.
Local empowerment
Since taking the helm in 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bailkoski said the key to the company’s success and financial performance has been empowering local leadership. The APAC region, under Lee’s stewardship, has seen year-on-year compound annual growth rates in the “high teens” over the past five years.
This growth has been spearheaded by both organic expansion and acquisitions, such as the purchase of Singapore-based iZeno in November 2020. Based in Singapore, iZeno specialises in application modernisation, DevOps, customer experience and hybrid cloud, with additional operations in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand.
In some cases, local teams have made their mark on the global stage. Bailkoski pointed to a cloud migration service developed in Australia for migrating workloads to Microsoft Azure as a prime example of local innovation scaling globally.
“We called it the production-ready cloud solution,” he said. What started as a local success story became the foundation for a global Microsoft practice that has grown from generating $6m in Azure consumed revenue five years ago to over $150m today.
Reflecting on his tenure, Bailkoski said: “If I’ve learned one thing over the last five years as chief executive, it is to empower my teams locally to make sure they can respond to customers as quick as possible, without being tied down by bureaucracy. That has been the key to our success.”
Read more about IT services in APAC
- FPT Software is experiencing rapid growth in the region, driven by its diverse workforce, focus on key technologies and ability to navigate a highly competitive IT services market.
- AsiaPac CEO Andrew Cheng outlines the company’s growth from a laptop PC distributor to a regional technology service provider known for its multicloud capabilities.
- Many generative AI projects are failing to scale because firms are overlooking foundational needs like network modernisation and governance frameworks, says a regional leader at NTT Data.
- As organisations move from AI hype to reality, a decline in trust for AI outputs is not a sign of failure, but a signal of market maturity, according to Bhavya Kapoor, Avanade’s APAC president.
- Kyndryl and AWS open centre of excellence in Malaysia to help ASEAN enterprises modernise and migrate their mainframe workloads to the cloud.
