As with most CRN Fast50 resellers Mbits is a small business with just eight staff, all highly skilled professionals; it has a clear objective of its target market, in this case small- to mid-sized government agencies in Canberra; it has a solutions focus, from networking to virtual desktop; and it has a passionate businessman driving the business onward.
Mbits is a solutions and ICT managed services company that bills itself as providing highly secure, fully managed "Desktop to Data Centre" IT environments for public sector and corporate customers.
The solutions and services portfolio covers network, such as network security, performance and WAN and application management; infrastructure, including virtual desktop, infrastructure-as-a-service, and field support; cross platform services, such as help desk, data centre hosting, storage, backup and archive; and data management, including databases and applications, and business continuity.
Mbits also provides a software-as-a-service called TenderingBits, which is a secure environment in which government agencies can write tenders for IT service providers.
Eugene Nolan came out from Ireland in 2001 and was sponsored for two years by Ipex, the integrator that was bought by Volante. Initially Nolan worked as a technician on-site for a Canberra-based Ipex customer, the 5000-staff Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestries (DAFF).
These two organisations - the integrator and the government department - would turn out to be crucial in advancing Nolan's career and the success of Mbits.
A year after starting at DAFF Nolan was promoted to team leader for desktops, and then later to agency business manager of Group8, Ipex's managed services division. In control of client engagement from 2003 to 2007, Nolan cut his teeth on how customer service and how it defined the success of a managed services relationship.
During his rise through the ranks Ipex became Volante and then Commander. Nolan's Melburnian wife, Mywanwy, took over sponsorship of his visa.
However, the company changed after the Commander acquisition and "no longer agreed with me as an individual", says Nolan. Where Ipex and Volante had a fairly flat hierarchy, with business managers able to make decisions for customers with a phone call, Commander inserted several more layers of bureaucracy.
The business manager had full client engagement at Volante and Ipex, says Nolan, but the larger owner increased levels for approval from one to five. "Customers get frustrated waiting for weeks for things to get done," says Nolan.
Nolan decided to leave Commander in 2007 and quit six months before it went into receivership. He started work for DAFF as a contractor while he was setting up his own business.
DAFF, like other Canberra agencies, needed to write confidential tenders for IT services without revealing the requirements to the current service provider, which would be expected to bid for the tender itself.
Nolan decided to start up a company that could deliver "a desktop service over the internet" using terminal services. "I was looking at SMEs and how to remove the need for a server in their environment," said Nolan.
He supplied a small team within DAFF with a confidential desktop service that they could use at home or in the office. The flexibility was important because the tenders often had to be drawn up very quickly and often around the clock.
The final product he labelled TenderingBits, which he then sold as a software-as-a-service to other government agencies.
Nolan decided to build his business around small- to mid-size agencies like DAFF because he saw that, unlike the big-name agencies, they rarely received the quality of customer service they wanted.
"There are lots of people selling to the Defences, the Centrelinks. Small to medium agencies get lost in the shuffle. Also they don't get treated like a customer. Most bigger MSPs focus on the bigger agencies; the small agencies get bundled in so they don't get the focus and attention," says Nolan.
He looked to set up a company nearby but couldn't find a suitable base within Canberra. The company instead operates from the NSW border town of Queanbeyan.
Then Mbits landed a contract that doubled business overnight. The reseller won a tender to provide complete IT services for the Department of Indigenous Business Australia, a 280-seat organisation.
Nolan was in the middle of financing a business loan for data-centre hardware and had written a 50-page business plan outlining Mbits' intentions. The 280-seat deal won the bank over instantly.
Nolan admits Mbits is "not everyone's cup of tea". Right now the company would not take on a big tier-one agency as Mbits hasn't got the resources to support those clients. Nolan has set himself a limit of 1000 seats, a band he says is very comfortable. "Never say never, but in the foreseeable future it will be built on small to mid-sized agencies," says Nolan.
When approaching agencies, Nolan decides whether Mbits would want to provide full services. If the agency is too large, Nolan pitches his TenderingBits service.
"We make a business decision to make sure there are no ethical issues. We don't bid for tenders while providing independent IT services" through TenderingBits, says Nolan.
The technology
"It's not so much the technology we use - that's available to everybody. It's how we use it," says Nolan. Mbits tends to shy away from the market leader in any technology area and go for up-and-comers that can achieve similar goals with cheaper technology.
For example, Mbits uses Juniper over Cisco for networking, and vWorkspace from Provision Networks over Citrix.
Nolan chose to use LeftHand SANs before the vendor was acquired by HP last year and chose Syferlock over RSA for two-factor authentication.
"We spend a lot of time picking products that provide a very good price point to clients," says Nolan. "With a lot of large vendors the licensing models have become too costly. You have to look at other products. Otherwise you'd never grow because you're always spending on capital."
The Syferlock solution provides authentication at a fraction of the cost of RSA tokens, he adds.
However, using second-tier or lower vendors involves engineers researching companies, taking time to test products and even liaising with the vendors' developers directly to troubleshoot an issue.
The US-based Syferlock hadn't integrated its technology with Juniper's until Mbits requested the feature for its own use.
"They sell it around the world now," he says.
While Mbits' engineers do their best, it doesn't always work out perfectly. They tried out Virtual Iron but decided not to go with it because "a few core elements concerned us".
The experience with LeftHand SANs was "not all beer and skittles" either, says Nolan.
Mbits tests all vendors' products to see how well they work "because vendors like to exaggerate", says Nolan. He adds that vendors and distributors have helped out by lending equipment and giving extensions to trials so they can properly test products.
"Ingram have been great - they will lend us stuff to play with for 60 to 90 days. Juniper is the same."
It's all about the people
Nolan brought with him lessons learnt from his time at Ipex. The company structure he describes as "me and everyone else". Employees speak to him directly and are empowered to make decisions on the company's behalf when dealing with customers. "The decision process is very quick," says Nolan.
If Mbits landed another big deal it would create a separate department; Nolan believes in the "seven plus seven" theory which posits that managing more than seven people at a time is not effective.
Nolan built Mbits on two main investments: forging a technology solution that was robust, flexible and yet affordable; and hiring the best people he could find. He says, without pause, the best thing he has done in setting up his business was to employ good people.
"Each one of these guys has an established track record in an area of expertise. All of us have come out of this market and are known in this market," says Nolan. Some employees Nolan had met before; others were found through a recruitment agency. Surprisingly, all have at some time worked for Ipex, Volante or Commander.
Although the company has only been around for three years, it has already gone through four staff. The biggest problem is finding people suited to a small business.
"It's immensely difficult to find good people with the right attitude. It can take from one month to four or five [to find a new staff member]. It's really frustrating.
"I have a very high expectation of individuals. I expect them to behave like I behave. It's been a huge learning experience for me," says Nolan. "People need to be technically competent, customer focused and have the right attitude - be open to new ideas."
Most of the technicians are self-managed and are responsible for service delivery to their customers. Nolan says he is comfortable devolving power to the individuals "because everyone is a known quantity" in terms of their experience and reputation. "Here the person in charge of the account has the power to make decisions."
Nolan's wife Mywanwy works in HR, accounts and as the office manager. She worked in HR at Kaz on the Defence contract.
Staff take part in a profit-sharing model which distributes 10 percent of profits among all staff. However, for the first two years Nolan has fed profit back into the business, and plans to do it again for the next two.
The flat structure and low overheads mean clients get a lot of say over how their service is delivered, without overpaying for the privilege. "And the clients like that," says Nolan.
"Having a small company focus on the agency means it can basically get what it wants."
Picking a distributor
When Eugene Nolan was looking for a storage solution, he settled on a niche SAN vendor called LeftHand. LeftHand's products are built around a nodal model that claims to make adding more storage relatively painless. They also cost less than big-name vendors' hardware.
Nolan reviewed not just the technology but the vendor itself. The company seemed to have reached a critical mass, was heading in the right direction and because it was hardware independent it would "be OK" even if it was bought.
Nolan considered EMC's Clariion range but couldn't justify the cost. "They are great products, but great price tags as well," says Nolan.
The prices of the SANs were increased after LeftHand was acquired by HP earlier this year. HP has also ended its agnostic status - HP virtual storage is based on open standards, but not its physical storage.
Nolan says he is happy to stick with LeftHand for the time being.
Picking the right software can also take time. Mbits' engineers have experience with VMware, Citrix, Parallel, and Microsoft Hypervisor. "They all have advantages and disadvantages," says Nolan.
Parallels Virtuoso is a better fit sometimes than VMware, which "has one fundamental flaw - if you have 50 VDIs in a box they all have to have anti-virus" programs running in each instance, says Nolan, which slows down the hosting servers.
However, Virtuoso only requires one anti-virus per container, but every virtual machine has to have the same operating system as the base container. "You have to map [the technology] to the customer's needs," says Nolan.
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
