NT reseller lands $5m government deal

Territory Technology has signed a three-year contract with the Northern Territory government valued at $5 million.

The new deal will see the reseller supply the whole of government with Toshiba notebooks.

Territory Technology and its web hosting division, Arafura Connect, have a combined annual turnover of $12 million.

The Darwin-based reseller specialises in hardware, software, services, security appliances, print and communications.

However, company founder Michael Feldbauer said the cloud was impacting hardware sales.

"A number of customers indicated that they were going further into a cloud environment," Feldbauer told CRN.

"When a customer transitions into a cloud environment, our hardware sales suffer because these customers are not buying hardware."

However, the company can capitalise on this attrition via its web hosting division, said Feldbauer. Arafura Connect enables the reseller to compete against the likes of Telstra.

"I bought Arafura Connect about eight or nine years ago out of liquidation. At the time they were just offering dial-up and some website hosting."

Feldbauer's experience as a reseller was helpful. "We had a lot of businesses that were disparate and communication issues in the Northern Territory are quite great. We had to look at expanding our infrastructure."

The deal meant the company was among the first to offer cloud-hosting solutions in the region. Arafura now offers a range of solutions, including Exchange, SharePoint, remote desktop and data recovery services.

"Since we took over Arafura, we got our own ADSL and our own data centre. We turned it purely into carrier hosting and into the cloud business."

Arafura has had to upgrade its infrastructure, including an investment in Netgear's ReadyDATA 5200 network attached storage five months ago.

"It comes preinstalled with everything Arafura needs such as thin provisioning, block-level replication, and deduplication. This means Arafura can securely share, store and protect critical data across the network," Feldbauer said.

"At the moment we host more than 1,500 business domains and we've got in the vicinity of 100 clients in our hosted cloud environment."

Arafura Connect is run by members of Territory Technology's 75-strong workforce.

"It keeps Territory Technology's engineering staff busy. It's allowed as to keep going and growing."