Services company CodeBlue has gone national by signing licensing agreements with companies in Wellington and Christchurch, to complement its Auckland and Hamilton offices. Infopower, in Wellington, and itSynergy, in Christchurch, will now trade under the CodeBlue banner.
CodeBlue offers fixed-price IT management. CEO Ken Davis says while customers are diverse, they have one thing in common: the desire to know exactly how much to budget each month for a stable and reliable computing platform.
“Proactive IT management for a fixed price has proved to be a winning formula for us in the local market. It’s the most common reason customers tell us they are signing up with CodeBlue,” he says.
He says CodeBlue has signed up a lot of customers who don’t want to be the smallest customer of a big provider, but who need much more than a “one-man band” IT service provider can deliver.
“There’s a big gap between the large and small service providers. Companies which have between 10 and 150 people are falling through that gap.
“We’re small and personal enough to get things done with a single phone call, but big enough to deliver enterprise-level service management and support systems such as remote network monitoring.”
Christchurch CodeBlue branch manager Shelley Inwood spent 10 years at Computerland and Gen-i as a technical consultant and business solution specialist before leaving to start her own IT service business.
She says she founded her business to look after five to 150-seat companies after seeing them face the choice between service providers who were either too big or too small for them.
“These companies don’t enjoy calling an 0800 number to find that no one knows them,” she says.
“They also suffer from sales people who promise big then rely on engineers to deliver.
“Five years ago a company like CodeBlue was not technically possible. Technology just didn’t allow ‘big company’ TCO tools to be offered to anything but big companies.”
Wellington CodeBlue branch director Shane Wood says his company is joining CodeBlue partly to improve efficiency around the provision of technical services such as network monitoring and support.
“It gives us access to more automated monitoring systems so we can free up staff for hands-on building and deploying.
“Some of the clients we support have more than 500 users, with offices in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton and other centres. As CodeBlue we can provide direct support to those places, with CodeBlue’s tracking systems enabling us to stay directly responsible to the customer.”