Newlease Rhipe for rebrand

Newlease will have a new lease of life soon, with the company rebranding to Rhipe from December 01.

Dominic O'Hanlon, Newlease chief executive, says the company is expanding rapidly, and faced a challenge in new markets where there is a perception Newlease is a leasing company.

“We didn't want to have to re-educate markets that we are not a leasing company, but a software and cloud channel company.”

Newlease's holding company is the ASX-listed Rhype. Rhype shareholders will vote at the AGM later this month on changing the holding company’s name to Rhipe as well.

O'Hanlon, who has been with Newlease just three months, says the company is a market leader in born in the cloud, subscription offerings. “But we haven’t done enough in terms of our own business to show that.

“It’s a bit like a plumber having the worst pipes or a builder’s own house needing work.

“There are things we can do much better to explain our value proposition.”

He says the company aims to help its 1400-plus service provider customers with more than just traditional licensing. The company has developed ‘utility metric’ based billing software, the IP of which it is looking at ways to package up and support ‘in a way customers can get a real benefit from it’.

He says the company will expand its offerings over time.

O’Hanlon says the company also plans to be more open with its IP, leading with, rather than hiding it behind its partner portal.

“Traditionally we hold a lot of IP which we can use to help service providers.

“Traditionally companies are worried about their competitors getting their IP, but that no longer applies. We want to lead with it and stay ahead, so people can see why they should go with us.”

O’Hanlon, whose past roles include chief strategy officer for MYOB, says Newlease is currently in rapid expansion.

The company has expanded into Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, with its subscription software licensing offerings from Microsoft, VMware, Red Hat, Citrix, Veeam, Trend Micro, McAfee, DataCore, Zimbra and Neverfail.

The company clocked up revenue growth of 45% last year, with 44% of its customers acquired in the last year, O’Hanlon says. New Zealand figures are not broken out, but says the country is a growth market for Newlease.