Regional Resellers: Toowoomba

Chris Robinson, director, Bit Precision

We started trading as Bit Precision in January 2013. There are three of us in the business and we look after small and medium businesses in Toowoomba.

We cover computers, networks and servers as well as digital marketing and web design, printing, and site backup and hosting. We try to focus on health and allied health providers.

Toowoomba is an interesting demographic: there’s a lot of big business. We look after a big medical centre as well as a lot of the smaller allied health places such as chiropractors. And we also look after some clubs in Toowoomba.

We largely work with Dell where we can. Toowoomba seems largely devoid of anyone who sells Dell, so we’re trying to push into that. The market here is dominated by HP. We’re a Lenovo partner as well, and we’re in the process of becoming a VMware partner. We’re also a Microsoft partner. We use Dicker Data, Synnex and Ingram, plus there’s Bluechip IT, XIT Distribution and Leader.

We’re seeing some growth for managed services and fixed price IT. We just want our name out there. It’s about marketing. Dell has been good for that – it’s a point of difference.

Jamie Patch, managing director, Priority 1 IT

I started [the business] about two years ago now. There’s a few in the team; the youngest is 22 all the way up to about 29. We have two full-time and four contractors.

Our biggest [client] has 50 computers. We have a mix of cloud and local solutions and offer 24x7 server monitoring and uptime response.

We offer Office 365 and are a big reseller of Xero. Other products include Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, and we have hosted Lync options as well. Our primary hardware is HP and Dell, from entry-level workstations to servers and blade servers. We are a reseller of Open-Mesh, the wireless networking technology. XIT and Ingram are our distributors.

We’ve been working a lot lately on business analytics, big data stuff, and focusing on custom web applications for database analysis. We have a customer with offices in Toowoomba, Brisbane and Darwin that uses Microsoft Dynamics. We’re interfacing in the ability for them to use their iPads and mobile devices to input data directly. Managed services are big.

We’re big on the Linkedin community here; we have a meeting once a month. We get all our customers from referrals.

Ian Hurley, partner and national sales manager, Downs MicroSystems/ VTS IT Group

Downs MicroSystems has gone through a bit of a transformation recently. It was started by Trevor Henderson and his wife Maureen back in 1982.

We started focusing more on a national level in the last 10 years or so, picking up customers from Cairns through to Tasmania, servicing a lot of corporates and a lot of financial services businesses, with key accounts in Sydney, Melbourne and so on. That elevated us in the industry. We became a Microsoft Gold partner, HP Premier partner, Citrix provider and the like.

About a year ago, Trevor and Maureen retired after a merger with VTS IT Group in Sydney. Since then we have acquired Dataflex and Blucloud in Canberra. We’ve now become more of a national player.

Our national support desk and call centre is run out of Toowoomba, as well as our administrative function. The growth in our Toowoomba presence has been a really positive thing for our community. There are more employment opportunities for the Toowoomba region and a better IT career path in a regional centre. A lot of key customers have head offices out of Toowoomba. It’s exciting.