The ‘ARN spotlight on’ series explores partners operating in the local channel landscape right around the country, from Cape York to Hobart, Byron Bay to Fremantle and beyond. In this edition, we focus on Canberra’s Nuvento.   David Sheard had spent almost 20 years mired in government technology before he decided to switch sides. Working for everyone from the Department of Defence to Attorney-General's department, Sheard realised there was a fundamental link unifying them across a spectrum of different technologies: the use of data.  Now, as the co-founder and director of Canberra-based Nuvento, Sheard is aiming to help government agencies and enterprises solve cloud, architecture and cyber security problems by addressing their data sets.   Often, he told ARN, these tend to be very large and complex data ecosystems. “Sometimes you have over 2,000 disparate datasets that have to be joined together,” he explained. “This data can be critical; sometimes it’s life or death. There’s mission critical data for defence, criminal [justice] and fraud from the Australian Taxation Office.”  Nuvento began life in March 2020 under the name of Data Refractory. According to Sheard, the original name stemmed from the company’s tendency to find itself “re-doing someone else's work – work that just wasn't up to scratch”.  “After a while, we decided to take data out of the name as we do other things like architecture and software engineering,” he said. Following a re-brand, the company re-emerged under the name Nuvento, which translates as ‘new wind’ in Portuguese.  Today, the company has a strong partnership with Cloudera, as well as cloud skills in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.  Data integration, management and engineering form a core component of Nuvento’s offering especially due to the high need for governance and protection emerging in Australia.   “Cyber security is a data problem,” Sheard said. “You always want to prevent an event before it happens, but if it does you want to intervene and stop it quickly.    “Cyber security is not going away and cyber security comes down to data. It relies on getting into data quickly being able to detect anomalies, ideally through AI [artificial intelligence], machine or deep learning.  “Data governance and privacy are lagging behind. Who is supposed to see certain data and where is it allowed to go?”   Critical to Nuvento is its long-running relationship with Cloudera, including its Australia and New Zealand vice president Keir Garrett.   “I’ve been working with Cloudera Distributed Hadoop – as it was then – for many years in federal government. That was the base product twelve years ago.”  CDH has since become superseded by into Cloudera Data Platform, but Sheard’s relationship with the vendor remains largely the same.  “The partnership today works well because it’s based on honesty, collaboration and openness,” he explained. “We both focus on the end goal, which is the client outcome. The closer we get to the client outcome and the more we share insights, the better it is. That has been the secret for us as a small Australian player.  Any discussion about data management and usage cannot go without mentioning AI, especially amid the rapid acceleration of generative AI (genAI) via CHatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google’s upcoming Search Generative Experience.   As Sheard explains, no organisation can commit to developing AI tools without effectively using and managing their data.   “Without data that’s available in a timely manner, AI is useless. A lot of organisations have fallen behind with data governance. AI is making people move quicker and many are scrambling to figure out how to ‘do AI’ without knowing exactly what they want or why they want it,” he said However, he added AI should reduce reliance on the workforce, which will prove especially essential to ensuring no human error leads to cyber security breaches.   As the organisation continues to grow, Sheard stressed the importance of sourcing good talent and, unusual for an IT company, Nuvento doesn’t follow the usual track of hiring IT graduates or simply from their competitors; among Nuvento’s team are people with degrees spanning history and philosophy, forensics and several in astrophysics.   “They come, we train them and we train train them well,” Sheard said. “It’s a big investment in terms of time and money, but it’s well worth it. We want people who can deliver well and deliver for the customer, and we think we will grow through that.”  Want to be featured in ‘ARN spotlight on’? Send an email to arn@idg.com.au with the contact details of the partner you'd like to nominate for us to profile.