Decisive move pays off in spurring BriteSky’s rise

A few years ago, Decisive Technologies was one of the fastest-growing companies in Ottawa. But its executives knew that if they were going to maintain that trajectory, they were going to have to look for growth opportunities in a slightly different area.

“The market was saturated and we wanted to continue growing, because if you’re not growing, you’re dying,” says Mike Smith, the president of Decisive Technologies and the executive vice-president of sales at BriteSky Technologies.

BriteSky Technologies, an enterprise cloud provider, was born in 2013 out of that desire for continued growth. It was the result of Decisive’s executives taking an intentional look at the marketplace and being in the right place at the right time.

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“We started listening to our clients,” Mr. Smith says. “Our customers were asking for cloud solutions, hybrid cloud solutions, on-premises, private clouds.”

At the same time, Decisive – a database solutions company that landed in ninth spot on OBJ’s list of fastest-growing firms in 2014 – was moving its infrastructure off-site and building its own data centre, which quickly became the basis for a new cloud offering.

BriteSky and Decisive are now separate companies, but they continue to share some staff and resources. Mr. Smith says that means his sales staff can focus on what’s best for the client, rather than trying to push them towards an on-premises or cloud-based offering.

“We can offer both solutions and we don’t mind which one wins,” he says. “Quite often, it’s a combination of the two.”

It also allows customers who have been using on-premises solutions to move into the cloud at their own speed.

“I don’t go into an account saying, ‘I gotta sell cloud, I gotta sell cloud,’ or vice-versa. I go in saying, ‘What’s best for you?’” he says.

Mr. Smith says the equipment used to build his company’s cloud infrastructure has also played a role in its growth. He says it’s all “enterprise-grade gear” designed to be robust and dependable.

For a small Canadian company, keeping the data it stores inside the country has also been a selling point.

“We respect privacy and data sovereignty,” he says.

Mr. Smith also credits much of the company’s strong growth to its people, adding both BriteSky and Decisive have built strong corporate cultures.

“We’re winning because of the way we’ve structured the organization, the culture. ‘Do the right thing’ is the tagline for both companies,” he says.

He says BriteSky also took its time to get things right before launching.

“We’ve done everything organically,” he says. “We didn’t go to market until we were ready and we didn’t have to borrow any money to do it.”

Part of that has to do with how BriteSky started. “We used to call this our hobby,” Mr. Smith says. “We built this for our own company, to have our own infrastructure.”