On this IT Factor podcast episode, Colin Gniel, Factor’s newest executive, shares his thoughts on:
- His 30 year career journey working with tier one vendors, including IBM, Dell and Microsoft
- His vision at Factor, emphasizing empowerment, growth, and innovation while staying focused on core capabilities.
- Advantages of hosting business apps on Microsoft platform, citing depth, resources, and global usage.
- Factor’s role as a business applications partner for Microsoft.
- Culture at Factor, balancing accountability with enjoyment and fun.
- Passionate about empowering individuals, contributing to industry growth, and creating an engaging workplace.
Transcript
FINAL 005: Colin
[00:00:00] Colin Gniel : If you look back over the last 30 years, you can pinpoint times of real transformation for us as a globe that can be pinned to an innovation that came out of IBM or came out of Microsoft or came out of Dell Technologies or came out of any of the contemporary vendors.
And I think for me, that’s where the excitement lies is. I’ve had a front row seat. I’ve been able to learn from the technology. I’m probably not as technical these days in terms of really getting under the covers as I used to be, but I still get a real thrill of understanding how that technology can be applied in a business context to satisfy some of these real business challenges that globally, we’re really in the middle of right now this is as big a change as any. The current waves AI .Every answer is AI, so to speak. But I think, the concepts are the same. Might be a slightly different technology might be applied in a slightly different area, but the base concepts are still the same.
And that’s what’s exciting. That’s why we do what we do.
[00:01:15] Juvi Rivera: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the IT Factor podcast. I’m your host, Juvi Rivera, and I’m the digital marketing manager for Factor. Today, I’m interviewing Colin Gniel, Factor’s newly appointed executive. A little bit about him. He is focused on the scaling and development of The Factor’s sales and go to market methodologies, as well as responsibility for developing and leading The Factor’s business within the Australian federal government.
With over 30 years experience in the IT industry, he has previously held senior leadership roles in Microsoft, IBM, and Dell Technologies, where he has built a strong reputation for collaborating with cross functional resources to develop and execute sales strategies to deliver business growth and objectives and delivering market growth and expansion.
A born and bred Canberran, Colin has a deep connection to public sector and has spent the majority of his life and career working with and serving the public sector market. He is a proud father of two daughters with his wife Penny and a basketballer with a love of fine wine and wood fired pizza. Welcome to the podcast,
[00:02:33] Colin Gniel : Colin.
Thank you. Great to be here.
[00:02:36] Juvi Rivera: I’m really excited to have this conversation with you as a newly appointed executive. I think there’s been a lot of hype around your appointment.
And I thought, why not have you on the podcast and really expand on that conversation and get to know you a bit more and have our audience know you a bit more. So you say that you are born and bred Canberran and you love woodfire pizza.
Is there a favourite place in Canberra that you’d like to go for woodfire pizza?
[00:03:05] Colin Gniel : There is, and yes, it’s a relatively new thing for me, but my favourite place for a wood fired pizza is actually in the backyard. I have one of those COVID things that kind of happen when we’re all stuck at home all the time is that we got ourselves a wood fired pizza oven.
And it’s become a bit of a thing. Not only… What we’re producing in terms of pizzas, but it’s an event it’s, by the time you set up the pizza oven, get it all running, make your favourite toppings and sit around. It’s a great way to connect with family and friends around good food and good wine.
Yeah, my favourite place is my backyard. My house and my family, my girls they’re the recharges of my battery.
They’re where I get all my energy from, all my inspiration from. Yes, it doesn’t matter what the day’s been or what the week’s been. I can come home and re-energise. And yeah, if it means, sitting at the back and watching the sunset and eating wood fire pizza, that’s not a bad way to spend the rest of your day.
[00:03:54] Juvi Rivera: Love that. I’d love to talk about your career for a minute. You had quite an impressive career in Microsoft, IBM and Dell Technologies before you landed on our doorstep at The Factor. Do you mind just, taking us back to those times and what brought you to Factor?
[00:04:18] Colin Gniel : Yeah, absolutely. I’m very privileged and very fortunate to be given the opportunities I’ve had in my career to, to work for some incredible organisations and be given the joy of doing some amazing things, both in Australia and in Canberra, but also globally, which I’ll be forever grateful for. As we indicated up front, born and bred in Canberra and went to university here .My fledgling basketball career, we’ll call it at that time, I was playing against a guy I knew who had a colleague who was setting up a small business, his brother got involved.
I put my hand up and said, can I get involved? And that kind of got me going on my IT journey. And, way back then I was a little tech guy that was working in their warehouse, unboxing PCs and putting them back together. And I never envisaged that that sort of humble beginning would give me the opportunity to do the things that I’ve been able to do.
And I got to IBM through a consulting engagement where I was working with an IBM consulting team as well, I was still working for that small startup company that I referred to. And when that project finished, they said, hey, would you be interested in coming and joining our consulting business?
And I had a fortunate choice. I could join their support business or their consulting business. And my wife and I were planning a family at that time. And I thought getting involved in their support business would be a little bit more stable for me. It meant I didn’t have to travel as much. So I started in the IBM world under the old Lotus brand umbrella as an enterprise support manager.
And from there, I progressed through to services, sales, product sales into some leadership roles. I’ve led an industry team across Asia Pacific for a while where I was able to share my experiences and passions in the public sector with our teams more broadly across Asia, which gave me a fantastic opportunity to travel and see a bit more of the world.
And then I came back to Australia to firstly the software business for public sector and then the software business as in the sales part of that under the director of software for all of Australia and New Zealand. And That was the last major role I had from an IBM perspective before making one of those radical career decisions after almost 20 years of service at IBM to try something a bit different and Dell Technologies was trying to start up a little cloud business globally called Virtustream.
There were some colleagues I knew there that were trying to set that up and they convinced me to throw in my IBM pinstripe suits and ties and and join the Dell team to lead their public sector business and try and grow that. And that was my plan. That’s what I thought I was going to do for a number of years.
And then as fate would have it, the local Microsoft business in Canberra had a change of leadership and they were looking for a new leader to come and lead Microsoft business in Canberra. And I was fortunate enough to go through that recruitment process and have spent the last five years as leading the Microsoft business for federal government. So that’s all kind of all aspects of the business. And again, an incredible privilege and opportunity in what turned out to be more difficult time period than we thought with COVID and a few other things getting involved. But what it really did is it gave me the chance to really hone my leadership identity, my leadership skills and my business development skills, as well as trying to transition an organisation that’s recently been a perpetual software business into what now is a very globally dominant and growing cloud and business applications business. And that was a 5 year role, give or take. And as we started this financial year, it was a case of do we do it again? Do we do something different? And for me, it was about time. I wanted to look to do something different. And The Factor is and has been an incredibly strong partner of Microsoft and Keiran and I have had a long relationship together. And we were chatting over a glass of wine and some lunch. And he said Why would you do another role in Microsoft? Why wouldn’t you think about something completely different? And that initial innocent statement and so forth turned into more conversations and more conversations about what he was trying to achieve at Factor. And it was something I really wanted to do after spending the best part of 30 years in tier one vendors.
Getting back to those roots, for the one about where I started my career in a small Australian startup that had big ambitions and was having a real impact in the clients that they were serving, saw an opportunity to give a little back to share some of the skills and experience that I’ve developed over my career and some of the wisdom and insights that others have shared with me by supporting a different style of business, shall we say, and here we are, I’m at Factor.
[00:08:53] Juvi Rivera: You’ve started your journey at a startup and now here you are again at another Australian based startup. You’ve expanded your scopes globally as well, and you’ve had your hand in so many different facets of technology from early days pre cloud to now these like really exciting business apps that are all low code.
It must have been really cool to be part of that technology journey. What has been your biggest takeaway from those big tier one vendors when it comes to technology in those last 30 years?
[00:09:30] Colin Gniel : There’s probably lots of aspects to that.
I think any of us that are working in the IT industry thrive on new technology, change, innovation, the opportunity to bring something new, bring something exciting and fuse that with the challenges that organisations are having in, whether it’s driving their business growth, whether it’s supporting citizens like we do in the public sector, supporting the economic well being of Australians and our gross domestic product and everything that fits under that sort of umbrella. The excitement is really about how we can fuse those two elements together, how we bring the best of technology to the best of business to solve some of these major problems. And I’ve been fortunate. I’ve seen wave after wave now. I’m starting to show my age in terms of how long I’ve been in industry, but I think that’s what makes it exciting . It’s doesn’t stand still.
There’s always something incredible. Living in that sort of tier one world, the resources, the talent, the development, the investments that sat behind those organisations. If you look back over the last 30 years, you can pinpoint times of real transformation for us as a globe that can be pinned to an innovation that came out of IBM or came out of Microsoft or came out of Dell Technologies or came out of any of the contemporary vendors.
And I think for me, that’s where the excitement lies. I’ve had a front row seat. I’ve been able to learn from the technology. I’m probably not as technical these days in terms of really getting under the covers as I used to be, but I still get a real thrill of understanding how that technology can be applied in a business context to satisfy some of these real business challenges that globally, we’re really in the middle of right now. This is as big a change as any. The current waves, AI every answer is AI, so to speak. But I think, the concepts are the same. Might be a slightly different technology might be applied in a slightly different area, but the base concepts are still the same.
And that’s what’s exciting. That’s why we do what we do.
[00:11:27] Juvi Rivera: And base concept, can you elaborate on that?
[00:11:31] Colin Gniel : When I say base concept, it’s the idea of infusing technology and business together in a way that has a meaningful impact, not on how technology itself is applied and the purists of how we design and implement technology, but how it improves the lives of those that are impacted by that technology.
If I think about what our core passions are here at The Factor, we’re making it as easy as we can for organisations to bring business function and capability, automate and allow that efficiency of saying, I wanna do the things that I can have the most impact on, rather than having to do the things that are a bit more mundane or a bit more repetitive.
I think we’re all the same. We’re passionate about what we come to work for, but there’s always that element of our job that we look at and go, I wish I could do less of that. . And that’s a fantastic landing point for technology. Where can we apply technology in a way, whether it’s AI, whether it’s automation, whether it’s customer centric or, user interface type connections to make someone’s role easier in a way that they can apply their passions and apply their activities to the things that have real impact, not the mundane things that we have to do. Yeah and that’s really where I see that kind of event.
And we’d be doing that for a hundred plus years that may not have always been IT technology, but technology, whether it’s, wheels, horse and cart, et cetera, is all about making things easier so that we can apply our passions to where we have the most impact.
[00:13:00] Juvi Rivera: When it comes to servicing the federal government, as there’s a lot of red tape, there’s a lot of bureaucratic paperwork, a lot of manual work that goes behind making Australia function. Can you speak about Microsoft technologies and how Factor uses those technologies to deliver impact to the Australian government?
And from a sales perspective, because you’re coming on with a lot of this sales knowledge on the other end, right? The Microsoft end and specifically gearing towards the Australian federal government. How is selling these products different from selling a service?
[00:13:40] Colin Gniel : THe Australian government has its own procurement approaches and, spend transparency rules and so forth that we engage in. Therefore, some of the business case development and funding approval processes are different to what you might experience in a banking organisation or a financial institution, etc.
But underlying all of that, it’s the same process. So selling consulting services is about providing technical resources to be embedded into an organisation to help them achieve what they’re trying to achieve, whether it be the implementation of new technology, whether it be the running and operating of that technology or getting an independent review of their use of that technology and how they might improve or gain more value from that implementation.
Selling a product is about aligning a set of capabilities to a business problem and then aligning how those two would come together to implement a solution to a business problem, so it’s a bit more productised in the terms that you now have a set of defined capabilities rather than we’re doing the analysis to create that set of capabilities in a consulting engagement.
You still need to go through the implementation and integration of that product into the organisation’s environment, but it’s about creating a set of capabilities that are easily understood by the business that can be easily implemented by an IT organisation and easily run and operated rather than having to create a one off, no one else has done it, custom implementation that has a different set of resources and life cycle management practices that are required to keep that operating as a business function.
[00:15:26] Juvi Rivera: And I’m going to ask dust off your Microsoft hat. Put it on for a little bit. Why would a government agency want to host a business app like a Factor App on the Microsoft platform? What are the unique advantages of that?
[00:15:41] Colin Gniel : Oh look, there’s a number and with my old Microsoft hat on and the role I played for Microsoft, it was very much about ensuring that the investment that the Australian government had made in Microsoft technology, they were maximizing the return on that investment, that they were utilising as much of that capability that they had already paid for to benefit their organisation’s goals and objectives.
The thing about the Microsoft platform is over 30 plus years, it’s grown and evolved. It obviously grew out of the Windows world and the Office world and that sort of Office automation world very much now a cloud and business applications business as well. But a whole lot of tools and capability that need to be plugged together to solve the problem.
So whilst the government has acquired a large volume of Microsoft technologies, how they pull that together to solve their unique business problems is still an opportunity that the market and the organisations themselves are trying to achieve. It is an ecosystem that’s well entrenched.
It’s got lots of resources ,lots of global usage. So there’s lots to learn and lots to share and lots to be able to leverage when trying to solve an individual organisation’s problem. And that’s really where we tried to come from as a Microsoft organisation was Microsoft Our role in Microsoft’s mission was to empower every individual, every organisation on the planet to achieve more.
Bringing that technology platform to market is one piece. Partnering with organisations, like our customers, like our partners, like Factor, to make that real, to empower, to therefore turn into something that is a genuine business solution. That’s where those two elements are gathered, and I think there are very few organisations that have the quality of business partners aligned and engaged to help make that happen compared to Microsoft; I think they just do that partner world very well.
[00:17:38] Juvi Rivera: The way I see it, there’s Microsoft on the left, Factor in the middle, and then the client. Factor is like the conduit to bring certain solutions for government agencies already using Microsoft products as it relates to their business problems. Can you speak more about the relationship between Factor and Microsoft and how you see it like moving forward?
[00:18:03] Colin Gniel : Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that really attracted me to the vision of Factor in its inception was the clarity of a purpose, the clarity of approach, and what Factor does as an organisation, but more importantly, what it doesn’t do. And I think lots of organisation, particularly Consulting organisations or startup organisations can get distracted by changes in technology, changes in market, changes in client demand and start taking on things that they’ve been asked to do, or that they think are highly profitable or valuable, but aren’t within the core sets of capabilities of the organisation.
It’s very clear, we’re a business applications partner for Microsoft. That’s what we do. We don’t do anything other than that. Our whole focus, our team, whether it’s our executive team, our sales team, our talent team, or our delivery teams are very clear on our capability and therefore deeply passionate, deeply skilled, and deeply focused on the outcomes to maximise the value of those capabilities.
So when you pull all those things together, we’re in a fantastic position to partner with Microsoft on their ambitions that they’re driving from a business perspective to partner with our valued clients on what they’re trying to achieve with the implementation or use of their purchases of Microsoft technology and be that to your point, be that conduit, be that organisation that can be a trusted partner, a trusted provider of capability. But more importantly, to send shoulder to shoulder in that triangle and say, Microsoft -Factor -customer. We’re all driving the same direction. We all want the same outcome. We want the best value for money. We want the best return on investment and we want the most capability that we can squeeze from the investments that we’ve made.
And that’s our mission. That’s what we’re doing at Factor. We’re not trying to be someone we’re not. We’re not trying to do somebody else’s role. We were very happy and we’re very focused on partnering for the right outcomes, but we know what we do. We know we do it really well
[00:20:05] Juvi Rivera: So you’ve spoken about what drew you to Factor. Can you share that vision down the line?
[00:20:11] Colin Gniel : I think there’s probably three areas for me is, we’ve talked about before. My career is very much been around how I can represent an organisation to drive scale, to drive growth, to bring some maturity in the sales process in the operating process to empower the individuals within the organisation to develop their career, to grow in places they may not originally thought or seen to grow on.
I’m very passionate about the empowerment, the enablement of people, giving people the opportunity. maybe you’re a technical person, but you think you’ve got some sales skills, but no one told you, you could. How do we unlock that discretionary passion that individuals have in a way that benefits them and their professional development and their career, but more importantly, it aligns to and drives the ambitions and growth of the organisation that they’re working within. And, Keiran and I very much blended over this idea of how can I bring that level of experience to his little baby, shall we call it, his organisation to help with the next iteration.
The success and growth of Factor over the last three years has been phenomenal and, we’re very excited to hear we land in the CRN Fast 50. Numbers that are coming up shortly, but I think more importantly we’re at that critical point where the next phase of growth requires a little bit of larger organisation maturity and rigor and process and focus which I’ve lived a big chunk of my professional career.
And so bringing that experience, bringing that insight, but more importantly, unleashing some of that creativity and innovation that’s deep inside me that often gets stuck in a large organisation, we have the flexibility Factor to pivot our business, to pivot our focus, to try on some things that maybe larger organisations might take a little bit longer to try on because we think we can have an impact. And if we’re trying to have societal impacts in everything we do, that means we have to be ambitious. We have to be bold, but we have to be focused. And that’s an area where I’m quite passionate. And I think Keiran and I aligned very quickly on that.
[00:22:23] Juvi Rivera: I do have one last question. I think this is the most important one. Are you going to be starting a Factor basketball team?
[00:22:30] Colin Gniel : Interesting. There are a number of people in our crew already who I have become aware of recently who are basketballers. They are probably at a different, how do I put it, age bracket, to where I’m playing basketball at the moment. I think it’d be great that we had a bit of a social basketball team.
That’s, as I said, one of the things I’m passionate about. I’m still playing basketball in our, in the AstroTeam Masters comp at the moment, but I think, what I love about us as a crew is we all bring our passions. And there’s lots of interactions and lots of fun that we’re having. I think, any organisation’s culture has to be a blend of accountability and responsibility to business outcomes and the clients that we serve and a sense of enjoyment and fun at the same time.
If you’re getting out of bed in the morning and you’re having a ball every day, you’re not working a day in your life. You’re getting out of bed every morning and dragging yourself to work, it’s the hardest place to be. That’s is equally important. For us from a leadership perspective is ensuring that culture, that enthusiasm and that passion for our business oozes through our own perspectives, as well as our collective perspectives.
And we’re embracing what is, I think, an incredibly diverse set of talent and experience. And I’m very fortunate that at this stage of my career, I’m able to start to hand back or pass forward some of those support learning and experiences that I’ve had over my career with some of the most influential people in the industry over a number of years.
I get to give back and that’s another reason why Factor was so important to me. It opened one of my passion areas that I was able to contribute to without maintaining that sort of very large organisation kind of element. Most people in IT have an ambition of joining a tier one vendor at some point in time. I’ve had the honor and privilege of being part of three in my career anything that I’m able to bring in terms of that expertise and experience to draw up the skills we need. Our industry is missing so many skills. So many roles are available and open and we all have a role and responsibility there to attract more people to our industry to drive more skills in an industry and create an environment where people want to work and want to be involved. And, I’m very passionate about it as well. I’m on industry boards and so forth as a result of that and Keiran’s done an incredible job and the team’s done an incredible job of creating a culture that embraces and enhances that.
Yeah,
[00:24:52] Juvi Rivera: absolutely. I think that’s all I have for you today, Colin. I’ve really appreciated your time and being able to pick your brain. Is there any last words of wisdom or anything you’d like to impart on the audience?
[00:25:08] Colin Gniel : I don’t know if I could say any words of wisdom. I think that would be a little self indulgent, but what I would say is, fabulous talking with you again. Super excited about being in Factor, really excited about getting out and talking to our partners, our customers and our suppliers. We’ve got a lot to share. We’ve got a lot to say, and we’re pretty excited about where we are and where we’re hoping to be. Thank you for the opportunity.
Thank you for the time. Thank you for those that are listening. Really appreciate your engagement and support. And please hit us up on LinkedIn.
[00:25:37] Juvi Rivera: Yeah that’s it for this episode of the IT Factor podcast, and we’ll catch you guys next time.
