Services drives growth for Victoria's Southern Cross

Expands to tackle "patchy" economy.

Southern Cross has bolstered its skilled staff numbers to strengthen its services in an aim to counter the lingering "patchy" economic conditions that have slowed major infrastructure spending.

Southern Cross has expanded its Canberra office, which opened in August, to six staff. All up, the Victorian end-to-end infrastructure provider has added 18 staff in the last financial year

The CRN Fast50 finalist's managing director Mark Kalmus told CRN that the recent appointments were predominately skilled in services such as IT security, services management and networking.

Kalmus said the business has had an average staff growth rate of 30 percent per year for the last three years.

"Our services portfolio is going strong," he said. "Our software and managed services practice is doing quite well, but the big projects are still patchy."

Major infrastructure projects are being pushed back, he said

"It's still patchy in the market place but the onset of the end of June has caused a few projects to move along especially in government.

"It got better and we had our best month ever in December. March and April were a bit quieter than previous years and then it picked up again," he said.  

"That's why it's important to focus on services."

Southern Cross' major partners include Microsoft, IBM, f5, HP and VMware.

In financial year 2008-09, Southern Cross reported 28.8 percent growth. This year, Kalmus expects growth to remain around 20 percent.

"We have pretty bullish expectations for the next financial year but there's still some uncertainty; the market is still volatile."