Regional Resellers: Mackay

Edward Woodwell, 
Managing director, EHW Technology

The business was established in 2004 and has been running for nearly 10 years now. Our core business mainly is business networking, from medium to enterprise, servers and networking.

We’re migrating a lot of clients to Office 365 and the cloud. We do data cabling as well. Acer and HP are our computer and server brands. We also sell Cisco and Brother printers and we’re a Brother and Acer repair agent for Mackay.

We are an internet provider as well. We sell NBN and ADSL services. We sell APC UPS’, Storagecraft backup solutions and mainly Microsoft products. We deal with Ingram Micro, Synnex, Bluechip and also ACA Pacific. The GFC didn’t affect us at all – the mining was still going. But now it’s caught up to the coalmine industry. There’s been a bit of a downturn in Mackay [but] in the last few months we can see people starting to spend again.

The NBN is helping sell a lot of additional product to our clients, like cloud storage, cloud backup, replicating their servers into the cloud.

Michelle Cornick
General manager, Redfox Corporation

It’s a family owned business that has been around since 1994. My brother started it off as a basic IT company. We were just doing IT repair work, which is quite mundane.

Now we’re predominantly in the corporate sector. Our focus has changed a lot. We’ve got about 16 staff. Now we focus on network design and implementation and rolling out large systems, from small business to very large.

We still utilise a lot of the same vendors: Ingram Micro, Dicker Data, Multimedia, Leader Group. We deal with HP, Cisco; we’d like to be fully skilled on the Microsoft front and VMware. We do IT network design and development, IT consultancy, managed service contracts.

Something quite significant in our history was that we stepped into being an ISP in 2000. We were one of three companies in the whole of Australia to bring in fixed wireless as an internet medium. We have a couple of thousand users, both home and business. We’re looking at reselling the NBN as well. We’ve got something really exciting happening now. It’s a free WiFi network we’re rolling out in the region. We called it Redfox Free WiFi. 

Deon Attard,
Managing director, Easy Internet Services

I started in 1996 and worked from a spare room in my parents’ house for two years. In 1998, we moved into commercial premises and I went full-time.

Internet is only a small part of our business. We mostly do managed services. We maintain everything: servers, desktop, notebooks, tablets. We have 10 staff. Leader Computers and Dell are our two primary vendors. Our distributors are Leader and Ingram Micro.

We do a little bit of retail as well – we still look after mum and dad clients. We have our own workshop and we repair computers and notebooks. Managed services are 80 percent of our business.

NBN is opening up in some areas in Mackay and that’s giving some opportunities for us to do things like offsite backup and a bit more cloud computing-type work. But there’s not enough coverage to do it on a big scale. We do home ADSL right through to business grade services. We even do wireless delivery. [Mackay] has been a good, strong area - one of the three mining sectors in Australia. The economy here has been very strong.