CRN Channel Awards Australia: Finalist Q&A with Basem Al-Sabri, Founder of Netomate
Basem Al-Sabri talks about being a finalist at this year's CRN Channel Awards Australia
What prompted you to enter the CRN Channel Awards Australia this year?
At Netomate, we've been heads-down building the practice, and the results built up to where it felt like the right moment to put that work in front of the wider channel. We are seeking recognition for the progress, but just as much the connection: the awards are where the Australian channel actually meets.
What would winning this award mean to both your teams and your customers/partners?
It would be an attestation to the work put in over the past few years, and for a founder-led business, independent confirmation that sound engineering principles compound value over time. For our clients, most of whom found us through referral, it adds outside recognition to results they have already seen for themselves.
What would you say is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?
Successfully integrating AI with deterministic automation across our own tooling and workflows to automate routine tasks. We did it the way we ask clients to: carefully scoped, measurable, and safe, with gates where human judgement still belongs. That experience now shapes every client conversation we have about AI.
What have been the biggest challenges of the current year so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people/partners helped with that?
The biggest challenge has been the gap between technical credibility and market visibility. We came into this as engineers, and what we underestimated was how much sustained effort it takes to get in front of the right people at the right time, particularly where enterprise buyers move slowly and relationships take time. We addressed it the way we approach technical problems: systematically, building a marketing function from scratch and leaning on delivery quality to earn repeat work. It worked, and we no longer rely on referrals alone.
What lessons do you think the industry has learned over the past year and what changes does it still need to make?
That applying AI to a business problem is not the same as solving it. Implementation needs careful consideration for reliability, cost, and what happens when it gets something wrong. Generating change with AI is straightforward. Verifying it is correct, traceable and safe is where most organisations are still underprepared, and closing that gap means treating validation as a deliverable, not an afterthought.
What do you see as the main opportunities for the industry in the coming 12 months?
Rethinking operations with automation and AI, rather than layering AI onto operations built for people. The pressure from AI workloads and operational resilience requirements is pushing organisations to act, particularly those running mixed-vendor, multi-cloud environments that were never designed to work together. We plan to capitalise by doubling down on what already works, starting with the client's highest-cost process and delivering results that matter.
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