Applaud hires Richards as managed services practice manager

IT managed services provider, Applaud, has hired Mark Richards as its managed services practice manager based in Sydney.

Richards will be responsible for managing and growing Applaud’s presence and expertise in managed services, including infrastructure outsourcing services, service desk support, asset management, remote management and monitoring, storage management, data centre and cloud management.

Richards previously worked for Dell within its managed services division. He held several roles with the vendor and was most recently its principal solutions architect.

Applaud managing director, Ricci Danieletto, said part of Richards' responsibilities included driving a series of continual service improvement programs to ensure its quality of service achieves best industry standards for its clients.

The new appointment comes as the managed services provider is stepping its play into the cloud.

Last year, Applaud traded out of voluntary administration.

Danieletto said during that time the business didn’t pause and didn’t stop servicing its clients.

“We spent six months prior to that fine tuning our marketing phase and talked about areas we plan on specialising in,” he said. “Since going through voluntary administration, we’ve picked up where we would have left off.”

“In the last 10 months we’ve really focused on the key areas that we can best service the market and it was around managed services and specialised services with key vendor partnerships in mind.”

Danieletto said it was interested in taking cloud-based services to its clients and had experienced some demand particularly from SMBs.

“It was also around the fact I identified good cloud providers, good managed services providers, but there was no one that’s really good at putting the two together,” he said. “I think that’s important because you need to underpin it [cloud] with services and support management.”

“Our cloud based offering will be different to our competitors because of our strength in being a managed services provider.”

Applaud’s main vendor relationships include Microsoft, Juniper, HP, Dell, VMware, Citrix, Oracle and Sun.

Its clients include Aristocrat Technologies, Chandler Macleod, Rocla, Penrith Panthers Entertainment Group, Scotts Group, The Observatory Hotel, Pan Pacific Hotel Group, Virgin Mobile, Tony Ferguson, and Healthe Care.

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