Regional Resellers: Doing deals in Darwin

Daniel Ladlow, managing director, Tropical Business Solutions

I founded the company eight years ago now. It started off as a fishing company, Tropical Fisheries, which was a separate company. It was my dad’s company – he passed away. Basically, fishing wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I got a taste of business.

I recently brought in a partner, Sonia Malady. We service small and medium businesses. We do cloud services, cloud email but we also do physical servers and desktop and thin client and home systems. We also have dedicated bookkeepers and we help businesses with their workflow. Generally speaking, we keep it pretty open [in terms of vendors]. That said, we do have a little bit of a flirtation with HP. We are attracted mainly to their warranty support up here in the territory.

For servers, it’s mainly HP. For end clients, it’s HP, Lenovo and ASUS. Synnex and Ingram Micro are our main distributors. We do a lot of web-based cloud development. Phone systems are also growing. A lot of our business clients haven’t been in for Office 365 solutions, they’re more attracted to the cloud desktop, like terminal services. Darwin is going through massive growth – new suburbs are being built almost every month.

Jeremy Boucher, business development, Leal Technology

Leal Technology was founded in 2002. We specialise in help desk services, on-site technical support, and server and network management.

We offer hosted products too, like online backup, Microsoft Exchange Services and managed antivirus solutions, as well as giving customers the opportunity to own their cloud services instead of subscribing and renting it from another IT provider or company.

We have our own servers in the local data centre here, Secure Data Centre. We are a Lenovo partner and IBM partner as well as being the only Eset managed service partner and 3CX phone system partner in the Northern Territory. Our products and services are used in a large range of industries including the public sector, health, tourism, defence, legal and real estate.

We pride ourselves on the ability of our staff to communicate and listen to our clients and provide appropriate solutions to their problems. I see Leal Technology consistently moving forward in the Northern Territory and separating ourselves from our competitors by offering different and unique solutions for businesses in the Territory.

Michael Feldbauer, managing director, Territory Technology Solutions

I started Territory Technology Solutions 15 years ago. It was one-person, and grew to 75 at one point, and we’re about 50 now. We saw a need for business IT that is reliable, does good work and keeps everyone happy.

It sounds stupid – but it’s good old-fashioned service. We started out with Netgear and IBM, and they’re still with us now. We’ve grown the business to $9-$10 million a year. [Our partners include] IBM, HP, VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Lenovo, Toshiba and Watchguard. We took on Apple a few years ago, and Cyberpower. About 10 years ago we were looking to get into wireless networking. We bought a company, Arafura Connect.

For the last 10 years, we’ve been doing traditional managed services: infrastructure, networking. We’ve also been developing Arafura Connect. We’re an ACMA-approved licensed carrier. We have a large cloud offering of more than 1,000 subscribers. We won a supply of laptops to the NT government recently, which is a four-year contract. We’re doing a lot more hybrid solutions. With Microsoft stepping away from the SMB server suite, it’s not very cost-effective for [small businesses] to buy all the licences individually.