Brad Pearpoint (Advantage)
The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly elevated the concept of the business "pivot” into popular language, but one local ICT supplier has been pivoting for nearly four decades.
Founded in the mid-1980s, Palmerston North based Advantage is putting the seal of success on its latest business shift, a drive into the managed security service provider space.
That move, which began in 2016, was the latest in a series of pivots that have contributed to the business’ longevity and success.
During the PC boom of the mid 80s and 1990, Advantage Computers launched into manufacturing and supplying systems to commercial, government and education clients before expanding into servers, managing director Brad Pearpoint told Reseller News.
While the arrival of the global multinational manufacturers in New Zealand shot that business to hell Advantage spied another opportunity.
The emerging buzz was all about virtualisation and consolidation and Advantage became a partner of EMC and VMware, taking their technologies into local and central government as well as enterprises as a value added reseller.
As the decade wore on, a new concept began to take shape – cloud computing. In New Zealand it emerged out of shared services as there were no major cloud vendors in the region at the time.
Advantage pivoted again, building its own datacentre in Palmerston North in 2008 to provide infrastructure as a service or shared services to the same industries and customers it was supplying with virtualisation platforms.
That investment proved prescient, as a series of natural disasters were about to ignite demand for disaster recovery facilities and services.
Pearpoint described Palmerston North is “geographically boring”, so it was by nature a good place to home a disaster recovery platform.
After building that out extensively, Advantage also leased space and expanded into Wellington and Auckland around 2010.
Around the same time, the efficiencies of shared infrastructure delivered a side-effect in the form of excess datacentre capacity. Advantage saw an opportunity in that to build out a managed services provider business.
That business, targeting mid-market customers is ever growing, with Advantage also delivering project-based work for larger organisations.
Clients in the legal and financial verticals came with quite heavy security and compliance expectations, so in 2012, Advantage had to go through a formal security maturity process for its datacentre to meet those requirements.
“It took a couple of year but by end of 2014 had a solid security play around our hosting platforms,” Pearpoint said.
With this new skillset, Advantage began to realise many organisations were struggling to deal with security and compliance themselves, leading to the latest in the long line of pivots – to managed security service provider.
“The outsourced, managed service model really fits for security as well,” Pearpoint said.
“We took the learnings, experience, tools and processes from our datacentre experience and turned that into an outward facing service.”
The MSSP business was officially launched in 2016 and has been growing ever since. Over the last 18 months it had “really taken off”.
Advantage in 2020, then, is still a datacentre operator and disaster recovery service provider. It still delivers IaaS and is also, due to the need for boots on the ground to service clients, a regional MSP for the Manawatu and Central North Island.
Layered on top of that, the new MSSP business is now serving clients nationwide and is “far and away” Advantage’s fastest growing business, Pearpoint said.
The common thread in all these shifts was that they were built on strengths developed within the existing business lines that helped the business to expand into new areas.
Because Advantage owns its own stack down to datacentre, Pearpoint said, it can control costs all the way through and get into new areas, in a sense, “risk free”.
The datacentre build, for instance, enabled the delivery of IaaS or “private cloud” for businesses that required low latency or needed to keep data in-country. It also works and was economical – for clients that didn’t need other cloud benefits such as auto scaling.
However, growth now was all about services, “high value stuff“, rather than legacy infrastructure.
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