We were engaged by Education Services Australia (ESA) to conduct a market scan and create a market strategy for commercialising the GovZone Secure Hosting capability that ESA has built internally. ESA’s GovZone is an ASD certified secure hosting service that hosts a variety of applications and environments for ESA offerings, as well as other stakeholders within the education sector. This is currently provided in an ad hoc manner.

ESA has invested in building Secure Hosting capability in order to service their internal business users. Realising the value of this service in supporting their internally provided services, ESA was interested in understanding whether this capability could be extended to provide value to the wider Education Sector. As a highly project-based organisation with limited commercial experience, ESA sought to understand whether offering its environment as a service was commercially viable, and what business model would be required to break into the hosting service provider market.

MXA conducted a market scan to understand the needs of organisations within the education sector, and how the offerings of other providers deliver to these needs. Through building understanding of ESA’s current GovZone capability, and it’s positioning within the market, MXA developed a commercial business model and implementation strategy to guide ESA in how to effectively commercialise the GovZone offering.

This strategic documentation has provided the basis a business case for further investment in GovZone as a commercial offering and built forward momentum into engaging service consumers from the market.

As a result of the market scan and recommended business model, ESA has developed an understanding of the capabilities required to commercialise its GovZone offering, and the risks it must accept in order to do so. Using this information, ESA has been able to justify to its board why further investment into GovZone is beneficial to the organisation, and how Onboarding of a few, small to medium clients from the market will provide a consistent underlying revenue stream to subsidise the highly project dependent funding cycles that the organisation is traditionally beholden to.