- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer,
and today we're interviewing Alex Koumaras,
the MD from Leopard Systems.
Alex, Leopard Systems work
with some of Australia's largest organizations,
including Toll, Australia Post, Coles, and David Jones,
just to name a few.
So can you start by telling us
a little bit about Leopard Systems
and how you service these large enterprise customers?
- Thanks Aley for having me here today.
Absolutely.
So where do I begin?
1990 was when Leopard was first founded.
And since that time we've participated
in what was then a fledgling enterprise mobility business.
Throughout that time, we've delivered
cutting edge solutions to many of these clients
as the technology has evolved,
and you can imagine many changes have transpired
over those 32 years.
All of the companies that you mentioned
across postal, transport logistics, supply chain, and so on
have all been major, and retail,
have been major consumers of this style of technology.
Their needs have evolved over that time,
and we've serviced them and many more over that time,
some of which are still customers to this day.
- [Aley] Well, it's very impressive that you service
some of Australia's largest companies,
and Alex, why did you make the move
to the cloud a few years back?
- Look, that was an interesting one.
So what we did was start to notice
that many of our customers
were lacking some of the resources and technical expertise
that they needed to support some of these complicated
and sophisticated solutions that we were delivering.
You know, further to that,
they were a big part of their business
but not necessarily their main line of business, as well.
So what we saw was an opportunity
to assist our customers at that next level
and take on the burden of providing them
a cloud computing solution,
highly secure, obviously,
but also be able to deliver it in a way
as a software as a service, with our own internal resources
that would ultimately be a little bit more consistent
over a longer period of time.
And that's definitely benefited our customers
over that time, not to mention
that the software as a service model
changes that high CapEx expenditure
that customers tended to have previously
into a consumption-based model.
So they were able to factor that
into their budget processes and so on
and provide greater value for their business over time,
and we're pretty happy that we're able to do that for them.
- Thanks so much for sharing.
And Alex, what was the experience migrating across AWS?
And can you share some of the benefits that it brought
to not only your business, but your clients, as well?
- Absolutely.
Like the initial cloud migration
was a great experience for us,
and what we knew at the time was we didn't wanna stop there.
So as traditional innovators in our industry,
we wanted to reset our thinking
and look at what the next steps were
to take it to that next level,
not just for us, but also our customers obviously.
In 2019, we literally cleared the deck
and asked all of our personnel to participate
in an evaluation process
to look at what technologies were out there.
And luckily for all of us,
AWS had exactly what we were looking for.
So once we pieced together the components
that we required for our specific use case
and our customers' use case,
what we ended up with was effectively
newer microservice server-less computing-based architecture
that AWS were prime for going on that journey with us
to that next generation.
But further to that, the relationship that was already there
was further built on.
You know, AWS personnel and team members at the time
had a good understanding
of our traditional monolithic style solution,
and this new-based architecture
allowed us to deliver a new platform
in a quarter of the time with half the resources
that we would've traditionally expended.
And that was great because what we were able to do
was output our new system even more efficiently.
Over and above the new architecture,
security was something
that we had in our minds from day one.
You know, traditionally it was added to the solutions.
Now, what we started with was applying a security model
as a baseline for any new implementation
or any new design that we had moving forward.
AWS truly had the solution that we were able to implement,
and we've taken that and applied it
to everything that we do moving forward as well.
- Well, I'm so glad that you've been able to cut costs
and improve security and run your business more efficiently.
And Alex, to round off this interview,
what is your vision for Leopard Systems?
Are there any specific technologies
that you think will enhance your offering
and create new revenue streams for your business?
- Absolutely.
You know, our current development path
is seeing us out to a point
where we replace everything that we've traditionally done
with our legacy architecture
with the new architecture
that AWS was instrumental in developing along with us.
You know, it's going to provide
an unsurpassed level of redundancy, scalability,
security, and deployment options for us.
In amongst all of that,
what we're also looking to insert
is technology that AWS has already proven,
and by that what I mean is things like big data,
artificial intelligence, machine learning,
and tying that to what our traditional solutions
have delivered to add huge amount of value
to our customer base.
And you need to understand that our systems
cater for a portion of what our customers do,
and where traditionally they might have been tied
to again a monolithic backend solution,
ours look to push the envelope and provide modern tools
that they can benefit from in the immediate term,
rather than having to wait five or 10 years
to be able to implement that type of technology.
- Well, I love that you're always looking
for new ways to provide value to your clients,
and you are always one step ahead.
So Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show.
If anyone has any questions,
please pop them in the comments section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thank you so much, Alex.
- Thanks for having me, thank you.