Profile: Premier Networks on a rapid growth path

While it may be more efficient, Beesley is keen to avoid the loss of customer interaction of his on- premise repair service.

“We have seen a lot of [reseller] companies switch to managed services and [lose] a lot of customers because they have lost that face- to-face time, when you’re running out in the car to fix a problem.

We still want to be a business that has a regular face-to-face relationship with the client. We don’t want to be someone who sits in the data centre and takes phone calls all day.”

Beesley has already experimented with cloud services, with mixed results. Premier Networks’ “SLAM Australia” service (the acronym stands for server location and management) accounts for less than 10 percent of turnover.

“I’m having to argue for weeks with clients to give cloud a go and they’re just not interested,” Beesley says.

“I am not convinced that cloud is the be-all and end-all that I keep reading about everywhere else.”

SLAM consists of a virtualised Windows environment running terminal services from a “pretty hefty” SAN and server blades. The equipment is housed in a telco- grade data centre with four levels of redundancy.

Premier Networks subleases the infrastructure to clients and sells unlimited Microsoft licensing, unlimited support and backup imaging through the SAN for $90 a user a month. “It’s always significantly cheaper. It would be a third or less of ongoing costs of having infrastructure in-house. But despite that, people seem to prefer having their own infrastructure.

“I think the reason is that they lose control. If they have their own infrastructure and the IT company pisses them off they can say, ‘I own my box, get stuffed, I’m going to get someone else to do it’.