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Responsive support, broad technology domain experience and strategic excellence prove a powerful combination in setting Ethos Urban up to serve its staff and high-profile national clientele.
Ethos Urban, a Colliers Company, partnered with Tecala to create a strategic technology roadmap, integrating cloud, connectivity, cyber security, automation, and AI, to enable secure, flexible teamwork across Australia’s most complex urban projects.
Ethos Urban offers a unique consultative approach to each project by bringing people and expertise across a wide range of specialities, offering stronger outcomes and benefits to their clients and community.
They call this Collective Intelligence. It’s underpinned by the principle that, regardless of the project size, budget, or stage in the urban development lifecycle, their clients benefit from a holistic service team approach across their various services and sectors. There are two core components on which Ethos Urban’s Collective Intelligence approach is developed.
First is its passionate people, who want to make a difference to everyone’s experience of urban living; and second is the innovative technology that empowers them. The outcome of this marriage is quality client outcomes and better living experiences for people in the community.
For over 30 years, Ethos Urban has helped shape cities across Australia, working with imagination and expertise to deliver better outcomes for communities.
Born from four state-based consultancies, the business needed to unify its culture and operations nationally. That meant evolving its digital infrastructure to support seamless collaboration, flexible work, and greater resilience across dispersed teams.
To enable this transformation, Ethos Urban implemented a strategic technology roadmap spanning cloud, connectivity, cyber security, automation, data, and AI supporting secure, agile teamwork on complex urban projects.
With these digital foundations in place, the business has reduced inter-office travel, improved project responsiveness, and built a more connected, sustainable workplace, empowering teams to work smarter, wherever they are.
A key focus area is the development of Smart City Solutions, underpinned by Digital Twins and AI-powered data analytics.
Digital Twins allow continuous testing, modelling, and refinement of urban strategies, enhancing decision-making, collaboration, and future planning, while supporting more resilient and sustainable outcomes.
By integrating large datasets across Geographic Information Systems (GIS), economic modelling, and 3D CAD environments, Ethos Urban creates digital replicas that support rapid prototyping, scenario planning, and enhanced visualisation. This enables project teams to identify and mitigate risks early in the design process, delivering greater certainty and value to clients and communities.
Danny Lau, Head of IT at Ethos Urban
Ethos Urban went to market and invited proposals from 10 MSP candidates, but initial responses to the process were heavily weighted towards technology-focused solutions rather than improving employee experience and meeting changing business needs.
Tecala came in at the tail end of the market process but immediately impressed and set itself apart. Danny Lau, Head of IT, saw cultural alignment between Tecala and Ethos Urban. Tecala was forward-thinking and strategic; Lau, as the sole IT leader, could only be effective with a team of experts to leverage technology to execute on strategy and “bounce ideas off.”
“I can’t know it all, so there’s a need to have a provider where I can leverage their resources and expertise,” he reasons.
According to Lau, the difference in support is like ‘night and day’. “We’ve experienced a shift in operating model from a processed focused call centre to a business enabling partnership where the trust, knowledge and perceptions of IT is elevating interaction at all levels across the business. We feel strongly that Tecala is on the journey with us.”
This more strategic engagement has restored internal confidence in end user support. “We improved our staff experience by providing that consistency of support,” says Lau. “At the end of the day, they get resolution much quicker, so they can focus on their work.”
In turn, Lau’s time has been freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives and projects that will help to drive continuous improvement in Ethos Urban’s technology, getting the company to where it needs to be to support its current trajectory and future growth ambitions.
In addition to end-user support, Ethos Urban expanded the scope of services delivered through its partnership with Tecala, modernising its IT environment to better support a flexible, cloud-enabled workforce.
The business rebuilt its wired and wireless networks to suit a hybrid, mobile-first way of working. It began adopting more cloud-based services, including Azure and Microsoft 365, and introduced a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework, underpinned by Netskope, to enable secure access for users working from anywhere.
To improve efficiency and reduce overhead, Ethos Urban also implemented Modern Management, a methodology used by leading organisations to create a more agile, cloud-native IT environment. With this approach, all IT services, including secure remote access, employee onboarding, and unified communications, can now be delivered seamlessly across locations. What once took three hours to set up on a new laptop now takes less than 30 minutes.
Building on this modern foundation, Ethos Urban has further digitised its operations by introducing automated documentation and workflow tools. Key project details, decision logs, templates, and process guides are now stored in a secure, centralised knowledge repository, creating a searchable knowledge base for staff across the country. This has significantly improved onboarding, continuity, and collaboration by making it easy for new team members to pick up where others left off.
This tightly integrated, cloud-first environment is supported by a strong cyber security strategy, delivered by Tecala and underpinned by best-in-class technologies including Check Point, Netskope, SentinelOne, and Arctic Wolf. Together, these platforms provide advanced protection across endpoints, cloud services, and user access, strengthening Ethos Urban’s resilience against an evolving threat landscape.
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