SOFTWARE company Stratpoint Technologies, Inc. said the shutdown of the broadcast operations of its partner ABS-CBN Corp. had heavily impacted its revenue last year despite the rapid increase in technology demand triggered by the pandemic crisis.
“The revenue decrease, a lot of it — I mentioned that ABS-CBN was a big client of ours — was due to ABS-CBN. We were actually impacted a lot by the shutdown of ABS-CBN,” Stratpoint Chief Executive Officer Mary Rose “MR” Dela Cruz said at an online briefing on Friday.
“There’s increased demand, but what happened was that a big client of ours really scaled down, she added, noting that it caused a decline of up to 30% of the company’s revenue last year.
Stratpoint saw a 62.5% year-on-year growth in revenue in 2019, and “it is looking forward to returning to that kind of growth,” Ms. Dela Cruz noted.
Stratpoint and its partner Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced the media on Friday to talk about their partnership and services through the Amazon Partner Network (APN), a global partner program focused on helping its partners build an AWS-based business by providing them with business, technical, and marketing support.
“Seventy-five percent of our revenue is AWS-related because 58 out of 78 of our current customers are on AWS,” Ms. Dela Cruz said.
Among the biggest clients of Stratpoint, aside from ABS-CBN, are UnionBank, P.J. Lhuillier, Unilab, Globe, Solaire Resort & Casino, and Singlife.
Stratpoint, as an AWS company, is a builder of modern applications. It specializes in providing agile software development, cloud, data engineering, and artificial intelligence (AI) services.
According to Stanley Chan, head of technology partners at AWS, there are two categories of AWS partners: consulting partners (IT consulting and system integration) and technology partners (software and operating systems).
Among the competencies the APN uses to support its partners differentiate themselves in the market are industry expertise, solutions, and expertise that focuses on workload types.
Stratpoint is an advanced AWS consulting partner. “AWS has allowed Stratpoint to have separate business units such as Stratpoint Cloud and our data engineering units that are mainly driven by our AWS expertise and AWS workloads,” Ms. Dela Cruz said.
APN partners begin their journey by building and developing their practices such as creating a business plan and establishing goals, acquiring knowledge and expertise, and building their own AWS practice, Mr. Chan said.
He added that AWS also works with its partners to build ways to differentiate themselves in the market by helping them identify APN programs that will help accentuate their business area of focus and gain the validation they need to solve customer problems.
Stratpoint does AWS Enterprise Landing Zone for ABS-CBN, Lockton, and Solaire. It has also managed their cloud and supported their application development teams using AWS services, according to Ms. Dela Cruz.
“The demand for these technologies has really increased during this pandemic crisis. Companies realized that they have to shift a lot of their systems to the cloud for resilience,” she said. “The first order of the day of the pandemic was really a resilience question — that when disasters like a pandemic strikes, can I still continue with my business operations?” — Arjay L. Balinbin