Anchor launched ACE on the back of recording a 47% year-on-year growth from cloud revenues, following a decision by the company 12 months ago to focus on engineering services and value creation. ACE will be available through four plans - Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum.

The offering gives customers on-demand engineering capabilities and provides collaborative co-value creation with customers. The service will be offered in collaboration with AWS.

In addition, the services will be billed through Engineering Credits (ECs) which are tokens that customers use to spend on outcomes (scheduled engagements with clearly defined outcomes), consulting services including projects and change requests, and always-on support.

Anchor estimates the use of ECs will result in a reduction of management fees from the typical MSP model of 40 to 50% on average, down to only nine to 15% with ACE.

Anchor also says ECs will incentivise constant investment in technology, therefore accelerating speed to market and improving customer experience while also improving return on investment.

Anchor sees this as creating a new market segment, and making it Australia’s first Engineering Services Provider (ESP), intending to move 100% of its managed services customers to ACE over the next 12 months.

Josh Chiswell (pictured above), director of architecture and professional Services, Anchor, said, “We’re aiming to minimise what companies spend on management fees when buying from managed service providers. What we hear from customers is that they need help in creating business value through technology, and that comes through engineering services and justifiable investment.”

“We created Agile Cloud Engineering - which is the first true on-demand engineering service in Australia - to advance the existing MSP model, challenge our competitors, and provide more value to customers as well as more price transparency. It’s all about delivering engineering outcomes with upfront pricing in the form of credits, which has not been seen in Australia yet,” he said.

Anchor says its new model will disrupt traditional MSP pricing which scales with infrastructure spend and is a specific fee per hour or day, or even arbitrary pricing for services. Instead, the ACE model is based on customer outcomes, scaling down support costs, and providing a menu of services customers may purchase from.

Chiswell said, “our strategic decision in 2020 to focus our efforts and investments on services that create value for customers rather than just cloud management was calculated, but it has paid off. This is definitely what customers want and need, that’s what they are continually telling us, the market, and why we built this unique new offering.”

Adam Beavis, head of ISV and DNB, APAC and Japan, AWS, said, "the future of cloud lies in the delivery of next-gen services that will help our customer’s customer innovate on AWS. Engineering services are central to this and we believe Anchor’s new ACE offering is innovative and will see a high demand in Australia. We are looking forward to working with partners like Anchor and supporting the creation and expansion of its new engineering services.”

Darryn McCoskery (pictured below), general manager, Hostopia Australia and Anchor, said “a year ago we made the bold decision to invest in engineering capabilities to transform into an engineering company. Investing more in our partnership with AWS was key, and today that transformation has come to life. This is a very exciting road ahead.”

“We’re expecting a lot of growth to come out of our new positioning and our disruptive ACE offering, as well as an expansion into new markets and verticals. We want 2022 to be the year we become the leading provider of engineering services in Australia, and lead the way for a whole new Engineering Services Provider market to emerge,” McCosker said.