Regional Resellers: Albury Wodonga

Guy Rowson, managing director, Tier One Consulting

My brother and I founded Tier One in 2000 in Melbourne. In 2007, we decided to open an office in regional Victoria.

In the past 12 months or so we've made some acquisitions. We've acquired a local business in Albury Wodonga, another business in Brisbane and are in the process of looking to make another acquisition in Sydney. We operate as a group of companies, each with its own specialisation and a close relationship with each other.

The current group of companies includes SMB and SME ICT services, as well as business applications and web services. Each of those divisions has a general manager that runs their own services team. Our distributors are Ingram Micro, Synnex and ACA Pacific. We're mentoring under the Albury Wodonga Digital Enterprise Program, through Tier One.

That's providing one-to-one mentoring for up to 180 businesses, in a federal-funded program. We've got an 18-month engagement to deliver mentoring to businesses with 200 or fewer employees. There's a significant amount of industry within the region – manufacturing, transport and distribution.

Josh Radley, manager, Mozzie IT

The business started in April 2000. It used to be an internal IT department for the Jacob Group of Companies, then they saw the opportunity to put it out to the market and start servicing other businesses.

We have six employees now, expanded from three this time last year. We've started to focus more on the B2B side, backing off from consumer repairs and sales: the market is just not there at the moment.

We try to do managed contracts and managed support contracts. Our main vendors are Microsoft, Cisco, HP and we do a lot of IBM and Lenovo. Ingram, Synnex and Altech are our main distributors. We're starting to get a lot of clients approaching us to do extremely intricate projects, rather than using an off-the-shelf package.

We've developed an entire system from the ground up – it's a task-management system with CRM and inventory management. We've just done our own internal CRM, as well.

We've had a lot of [IT providers] closing down in the area. We're actually seeing an influx [of customers], because those customers still need to receive support.

Chris Hogan, director, Infotech Management

The company started around 1995 and I came into the business at the start of 2011. Back then, pretty much everything was break/fix.

We've been working towards more managed services these days: more than half of our business is on a managed-services basis. It gives us stability and cashflow. We have five full-time staff and one part-time. We deal primarily with HP hardware – laptops, desktops and servers – and mostly Microsoft platforms.

A lot of our clients would run at least two servers: we are virtualising on Hyper-V and ESX. We've got a couple of HP SANs out there, as well. We also offer some cloud services – email, Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint and managed spam filtering.

We use Labtech software for remote monitoring and management. We've been adding a couple of medical surgeries [as clients] every few months. That's generally been word-of-mouth recommendations. We are looking to market to more of our segments more intentionally in the future but, so far, the business seems to be growing without that.