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Aware Group appoints Mike Jenkins as chairman
Microsoft innovation partner Aware Group has appointed The Instillery founder Mike Jenkins to chair its board, with CEO Brandon Hutcheson keen to focus on a new three-year plan, Series A capital raise and acquisitions.
Hamilton-based Aware Group offers a blend of productised professional services, managed services and software to enable rapid adoption of emerging technologies for enterprise and government clients with a focus on AI, big data, and robotics.
Jenkins is pursuing a new chapter in his tech career, focusing on unleashing the potential of kiwi owned niche market leaders to accelerate growth as well as supporting enterprises and government agencies to navigate the digital world.
Aware Group set to accelerate growth
Founded in 2016, Aware Group offers its Aware AI platform, which has grown rapidly and consistently at 80 per cent plus a year in a competitive global market historically dominated by large internationally owned consultancies.
At inception, Aware Group had five team members and a handful of local kiwi clients. Today it has more than 40 senior consultants, analysts and technical engineers in offices across Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Asia and the USA.
It also claims a stable of more than 200 global clients.
Aware Group co-founder and CEO Brandon Hutcheson said Jenkins’ appointment will allow him to focus more on accelerating the execution of Aware Group’s new three-year plan, including a Series A capital raise and a number of new acquisitions.
“His experience, lessons learned through extreme growth, navigating the business through the uncertainty of COVID and mergers and acquisitions bring a new wealth of complementary skills to an already stacked executive leadership and supportive team of directors here at Aware Group,” Hutcheson said.
Hutcheson says the technology landscape was changing quickly.
“With COVID accelerating enterprise and government agency adoption of this new technology, my team at Aware are uniquely positioned to activate the right balance of custom and productised tech in partnership with these enterprise organisations for maximum impact.”
Data is the new Black
Jenkins said after a decade of “liberating enterprises from traditional IT providers”, he has quickly realised data is the new black.
Many enterprises are investing huge sums in next generation tech which should be delivering promised value but in practice are only returning mediocre results, he said. The leading reasons these organisations are struggling to realise their dream stems from the fact their organisational cultures and their operating models are not suitable for the new ways of working.
“If there isn’t a culture of putting data at the heart of everything that you do – essentially allowing the right data to get to the right people at the right time – then you can hire the smartest data geeks (with love) in the world but you won’t see any return,” Jenkins said.
To address such challenges, Aware Group have “bottled” its experience into easy to procure and consume services and software products, such as Aware AI, he said.
Aware Group was awarded Microsoft’s Azure Partner of the Year at the tech giant’s Malaysia 2021 partner awards. They were also finalists in four local Microsoft Partner Awards including data and AI, business applications, security, and digital and application innovation awards.
Aware Group exists to enhance humanity through Artificial Intelligence. Their mission: enable sustainable business services, always deliver on value, educate and inspire.
Aware Group
We believe in creating solutions that always deliver significant value, remain affordable, and will inspire new innovation.
Data, AI, BI & ML
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