SoftIron’s ongoing and highly-valued partnership with Baidam Solutions – Australia’s leading First Nations ICT security services and solutions provider – began late last year, fairly soon after we launched our global channel partner program, SoftIron + Co.
In fact, Baidam Solutions signed on as one of our first channel partners in Australia. It’s a truly commendable, Supply Nation certified ICT consultancy that aims to help its customers (especially those in regional and remote communities) to achieve logical business outcomes using innovative technology solutions. Moreover, Baidam Solutions focuses on facilitating educational and employment pathways for more Indigenous involvement in Australia’s technology community – and this sort of initiative to positively enact social change undoubtedly deserves recognition.
Last month (May 2022), Baidam Solutions CEO and Co-Founder (and Torres Strait Islander), Jack Reis, won the prestigious Sam Tjengala Reuben Award Recognising Young Entrepreneur of the Year at Supply Nation’s 2022 Supplier Diversity Awards.
Even more recently,
Baidam Solutions was named a Queensland Reconciliation Award Business category winner, specifically for its ICT scholarship program.
We’re absolutely delighted (but not really surprised) by the double-bestowment of accolades recently presented to the Baidam Solutions team. It’s an organisation with whom SoftIron is incredibly proud to be partnered. Like Baidam Solutions, we too believe that challenging the market through technology and innovation is the key to raising standards and creating opportunity for everyone – service providers, enterprises and the general community.
Do things differently. Create meaningful change.
Baidam Solutions is a relatively young business. Established in 2018, it has grown from a team of just three to a headcount of more than 20. It has awarded two lifetime scholarships to the Australian National University (ANU) and to the University of Queensland (UQ). It has funded educational pathways for many Indigenous Australians to gain a foothold into the lucrative cyber security industry, and it’s supporting Australian organisations to achieve their Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) targets.
It’s critical for SoftIron to have delivery partners, such as Baidam Solutions, that also seek to make data sovereignty the right of each person and country.
Baidam and its mission encompass all the attributes we look for when engaging with channel partners, and our alliance is helping to fuel growth in Australia. We’re honoured to support the great work Baidam is doing to pioneer and fund digital pathways for First Nations people. Our partnership with Baidam continues to push us beyond our capabilities for a long-term contribution to meaningful social change in Australia.
SoftIron will soon officially launch the first base-level computer manufacturing facility on Australian soil. Not often the case for IT vendors, Australia is of prime strategic importance to us, and we’re building our product locally as a key proof point.
We’ve been developing the APAC market for a couple of years now and have several in-region teams. Through our Sydney-based factory, SoftIron will bolster Australia’s data infrastructure resilience by locally manufacturing our world-leading data centre solutions. Our products will help our local customers deploy a credible, transparent and sovereign alternative to public clouds that are based on imported, opaque hardware.
As a critical point of difference, SoftIron builds and manufactures products with what we call Secure Provenance. As far as we know, we’re the only company in the world that can provide a fully auditable product design and realisation process for those customers that need to build their own in-depth risk assessments to deploy in the most sensitive of environments. Additionally – and as it must be noted – the experience of Covid-19 showed the world that supply chains for critical technology must be more resilient.
SoftIron has architected the business to enable us to efficiently replicate manufacturing, audit and control within strategic locations anywhere we choose, growing hi-tech manufacturing skills, reducing supply chain dependencies by supporting the growth of local vendors and allowing a far greater degree of scrutiny than would otherwise be possible. This approach of “Edge Manufacturing” has many benefits, including greater sustainability as well as efficiency and reliability of supply – no matter what’s happening on the global stage.
To use Aussie slang, we’re simply “stoked” to be expanding our presence into the Australian market, where we’re finding “ripper” partners such as Baidam Solutions that are supporting future First Nations cyber leaders, and making very worthwhile contributions to our industry as well as to the communities in which we operate as a whole.
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SoftIron acknowledges the traditional custodians of country across Australia. We pay our respects to them, and to Elders past, present and future.
Phil Crocker
VP Business Development and Channel
