Intelia CEO on how good culture can give a company the competitive edge

Byron Roach spoke to CRN Australia on how good culture, creates a good company.

When Byron Roach, CEO and co-founder launched Google Cloud provider Intelia in 2018, he made sure that the organisation’s culture was strong, so they could build a competitive brand.

Speaking to CRN Australia at Google Cloud Summit 2025, Roach said a company can only deliver great outcomes if they have great organisational culture.

“If you’re going to compete through a services business, you can only deliver great outcomes if you have a great organisational cultural retention of IP, attraction of talent, interesting work, and all the things that keep people around,” he explained.

To build a successful services business, Roach said you need to attract and retain great people. He explained how they did that with Intelia.

“When we first started and we went down the GCP path, there wasn't a there wasn't a heap of GCP skills in the marketplace. We hired good people with excellent cloud experience, or even on prem data experience, and invested in them,” he said.

“We've built a culture of development, we often refer to continually evolve internally, and it's become a thing because this market moves so quickly you need to be able to continually stay relevant to add any value to your customer network.

“That underpins our culture is the learning piece.”

To deliver great outcomes, Roach said partners need to keep good people and build trust with each other, which in turn builds good culture.

"What we felt was providing a platform, if you’re dragging culture, you're not building culture then it comes down to too many, too few,” he said.

“It's about creating a platform where people can be heard and seen, they can explore, they can feel comfortable to talk up. But fundamentally, if you hire good people, they want to be creative and they want to learn like they're smart people. They're way smarter than I.”

He added, “To give them the space to do that, to give them the tooling that they can go and learn, and it almost becomes that they start to push each other. There's a bit of a race on for certain skills, certain certifications and badges, and that underpins a lot of it.”

Business impact of AI

The business impact of AI is still playing out, Roach noted that as innovation and technology is moving rapidly through this period, the customer process, or sales process is slowing, because there's a big education piece.

“A really interesting time, because the whole world has almost come into it at the same time,” he explained.

“Yes people have got, different levels of interest and self educated and whilst AI always been around for a long time, but it landed on us.”

Roach explained how the education around AI in the partner community has evolved.

“The traditional process of doing business may have been an RFP process, or two or three workshops,” he said.

“Today, that often is eight workshops, because customers are wanting us to talk to different stakeholders, different business units, identify how AI can be applied to so many different use cases and benefits associated.”

He said there is so much information out there, so to be able to get through all the trees a little bit, demos become important.

“Showcasing the technology is important in the sales process, as is the education,” he ended.