Ex-Heathrow IT head brings client-side clout to Perth reseller

Perth MSP Thinkin' IT has acquired a local company and taken on its founder, who used to run IT for Heathrow Airport.

Thinkin' IT bought one-man band Layer IT at the end of last year.

The acquisition should give Thinkin' IT a footprint in Mandurah, south of Perth, as well as impressive client-side credentials.

Layer IT's founder, Daniel Newman, was previously the Heathrow Airport site manager, working for vendor SITA and its local partner ESP.

He then moved out to Australia as SITA's site manager for Perth Airport.

SITA is a specialist contractor for air transport IT and communications. Its clients include British Airways and Cathay Pacific, and it even ran the Electronic Travel Authority scheme for Sydney 2000.

Newman has taken a full-time role as senior project manager at Thinkin' IT, said managing director Keenan Haigh. "He will be left to run his own clients under our banner but with our buying prices. He is bringing 15 clients all with servers.

"He is extremely highly skilled in Cisco and CCTV stuff. We have started slowly reaching into that – we are slowly going into hosted CCTV."

Newman's airport credentials should open new doors for Thinkin' IT.

His past roles at Heathrow included replacing all of the London's airport's 15,000 Dell computers and printers with HP machines over a seven-month period, as well as setting up a whole new computer system in Terminal 4 after British Airways moved to the newly built Terminal 5.

"I still have a lot of contacts in the airline industry and have just started to do a lot of work with Fujitsu with the airlines. That is a different focus for Keenan and the boys," Newman told CRN.