WA reseller brings managed services to the Kimberley

Some might think of regional IT companies as standard office hardware resellers with limited stock and services, but Leading Edge Computers Broome is a great example of how one modern business can be transformational for a community thousands of kilometres from the nearest city.

Nicola Walters, who has worked in various IT teams for educational institutions and has lectured on the industry for TAFE, purchased the company in 2009 and quickly acted on a vision to bring true managed IT services to the Kimberley.

“I was very driven by the fact that being remote, there wasn’t any support for the local businesses. They had to get a company from Perth to remotely support them, and they just weren’t getting the service that you could if you were using someone who was local,” Walters said.

“So there was definitely a hole in the market for managed services. It was very much a break-fix model up until managed services came around, and we didn’t run a break-fix model – that’s what other companies did.

“We’ve certainly been educating our customers that this is how you need to manage your business, using an IT budget and using technology to drive a company forward.”

Another area Walters is passionate about is educating the next generation of IT stars, particularly encouraging more women into the sector.

Leading Edge Broome, in attracting more people to the industry, is focused on early engagement, and has been operating an after-school coding club, with Walters also pushing for a lunch-hour coding club.

“Of the four juniors that I employ, three are female and they will all work in the workshop as technicians and become certified,” she said.

“And I just hope it starts a trend. It is something we have been talking to the Leading Edge Computers group about, in terms of what we can do to generate more interest and encouraging more people into the industry, because we’re going to need it.”

Running classes and engaging students with work at a young age is a strategy that will also help address Walters’ own business’ staffing needs over the long term. While staffing in IT is a challenge often remarked on by metropolitan IT leaders, it is compounded in the country.

“I think I take a long-term approach to employment. We start employing at 13 and we have a career path. The idea is that perhaps, just perhaps, they might go away from Broome, continue their career in IT and then they will come back home in their 30s and be our future workforce. That’s really the long-term planning. And believe it or not, it does work.”

Walters said being a Leading Edge Computers member was beneficial for brand recognition and provided buying power around the established vendor relationships key to the businesses’ offering, such as Apple, HP, Toshiba, Oki, Cisco, Microsoft and Ubiquity.

“Being part of the Leading Edge Computers group, there were other stores in WA that were starting to do managed services, so it was fantastic to have that peer group where you could discuss what works and doesn’t,” she said. “When you’re remote, there’s a lot of companies that have not invested in updating technology for at least 20 years, so some of them are going through quite a tough journey.

“Broome, luckily, has such a huge tourism industry that we definitely have to be modern; we’re not this sleepy backward town where the service is crap and all the rest of it, but there are just some old habits.”

Walters said though the town was just now getting NBN, Broome’s residents had been shopping online for many years, and were more than happy to embrace cloud services.

Leading Edge Computers Broome has also delivered big IT upgrades to remote schools, and Walters said the impact of selling iPads to a remote school, such as one deployment in the Great Sandy Desert, gave students a technological lift like none they had experienced previously.

This Regional Reseller profile was written in partnership with Leading Edge Computers. 
To find out how the Leading Edge Group can support your business, call 02 8732 9524 
or visit www.leadingedgegroup.com.au