Компания Advantage отметила 40-летие, став ведущим поставщиком управляемых услуг в Новой Зеландии

Advantage celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. In that time, it has evolved from a PC manufacturer based in Palmerston North to a fully-fledged managed services provider with a team of 70, as well as support for customers in Australia and the Pacific. Advantage executive director Brad Pearpoint and chief operating officer Luele Driescher spoke to Reseller News about the company’s journey over the decades, as well as where it is heading in the age of AI. Over its 40 years, Advantage has gone through several permutations as it adapted to the ever-changing technology landscape and the needs of its customers. “We spent the first 15 years of our life as a PC manufacturer. We imported white-label parts from overseas and built our boxes with the red ‘A’ on it that ended up in government, education, health and also retail,” said Pearpoint. “I think we were the number two retailer in terms of PCs sold in New Zealand at one point.” The company’s first pivot came towards the end of the 1990s as international PC vendors started entering the country, putting pressure on local PC makers. “Hardware margins very quickly became a thing of the past, so we had to transition what we were doing and changed from a manufacturer to a services business,” Pearpoint said. “We focused on virtualisation and helped a lot of those same [customers] – health boards, education and central government – have their first SANs [storage area networks] and VMware environments. We helped [them] consolidate from rooms of individual discrete services onto a virtual private cloud-type platform. “That went really well for us.” This eventually led to Advantage building its own data centre in Palmerston North in 2008, from which it delivered shared services to the same set of customers who first bought PCs from the company. “The closest data centre at the time was probably Singapore and internet lines were pretty poor, so not suitable for production loads,” Pearpoint said. “Following the Christchurch earthquakes, disaster recovery became a big topic, and we realised Palmerston North was a pretty boring place geographically, but a good place to put your data. So, disaster recovery became a big part of what we what we did, as well.” Down the security services path By the mid-2010s, Advantage had a lot of clients in the medical, legal and financial sector for whom security and compliance were vital, and so it developed an in-house team and services to protect clients’ private cloud platforms. That led it down the security services path. “Fast forward to 2017, and we realised the outsourced security market was about to take off and that we were well positioned as we were already a managed services business,” Pearpoint said. “We had this really good inwards-focussed team doing security, so we ended up bolstering that team, productising them and then selling them outbound. “At that point, we had our managed IT services, our private cloud platform and a managed security services business, as well.” Then in 2019, Advantage moved out of the Manawatu region by opening an Auckland office to stake its claim on the national stage. “We’d spent the first 30 years of our life focused on the Manawatu. A lot of our clients called us one of New Zealand’s best kept secrets, because they loved us. But outside of Manawatu, no one knew who we were. “The Auckland office gave us a nationwide presence and people started realising who we were.” With the surge of demand for IT services following the Covid pandemic, Advantage acquired Wellington-based boutique networking provider Nspire Technologies in 2022 giving it a presence in the capital. “That gave us another string to our bow as they were focused on high-end critical networking and gave us another 15 smart engineers to join the ranks,” said Pearpoint. In 2023, the company changed its name from Advantage Computers to just Advantage to break the outdated association of selling PCs. Adapting to customer needs Changing as needed has been critical to Advantage’s success, Pearpoint added. “There have been at least four different iterations of Advantage, and the current one is very different from the first. All the way along, we’ve always been willing and able to change as needed.” Adapting with changing market trends and needs helped Advantage retain many of the same customers over the years. “[That] is part of the reason why we’ve got customers that have been here just as long as I have,” said Pearpoint, who joined the business as a senior solution architect in 2007. “We have some extremely long-term customers that love dealing with us.” The longevity of its client relationships can also be attributed to Advantage’s partnership approach with customers. “We’ve always had a client-led business,” Pearpoint said. “We maintain partnership with customers. It’s very much a joint conversation – so we can understand them and can work truly as a partnership,” Pearpoint said. “We want [customers] to see the value in what we do, which means we need to work quite closely with them.” Being a local operator, Advantage has been able to adapt fast to technological changes and meeting the demands on clients. “Once we decide to do something, we’re pretty efficient at going ahead and doing it. We don’t have big multinational kind of layers of bureaucracy behind us,” Pearpoint said. The next evolution In terms of what the next evolution for Advantage will look like, security remains a key focus area. “Security is still the fastest growing part of what we do – it has not finished yet, that’s for sure,” Pearpoint said. “Surprisingly, our private cloud platform is also still growing a lot. There seems to be a resurgence to get out of the public cloud whether it’s cost saving or geopolitical reasons.” While the AI wave is bringing change, Advantage sees it as an addition to its security or data centre services, rather than a standalone practice. “At this point, there [isn’t] a massive shift for us just yet. It’s more of a continuation along the same lines,” Pearpoint said. “AI is going to be augmenting our current services as opposed to being a standalone brand or department for us.” Pearpoint took over running the business from founders Mark and Carol McGillivray, who remain majority shareholders and directors, in 2017. However, he stepped down from managing director at the start of 2025 with Driescher taking over those duties as chief operating officer. Her focus is on capitalising on what the business has done well. “We’ve always been innovative and there is still a lot of that happening. If we look at what we’ve developed within our security practise over the last two years – we’re going to continue with that.” Networking is another area where Driescher sees growth opportunities for Advantage, especially as organisations have become far more reliant on networks to ensure access to critical services. “We’re taking a different approach in the market – to bring that leading service to smaller players,” she said. “We’ve also made huge gains in the midmarket and enterprise level in the networking space and that’s where we’re seeing our footprint increase. I’d like to see us do more in that space.” Driescher also sees opportunities for Advantage to gain more work offshore. “We have clients in Australia and the Pacific Islands already. It’s definitely something we would be looking to explore,” she said. “Because our partnerships extend into A/NZ, we are seeing pickups from Australia heading our way.” The company still also wants to increase its footprint across New Zealand. “It would be fair to say we wouldn’t mind a South Island office in due course,” Driescher said. As part of the company’s 40th celebrations, Advantage launched a contest in which one New Zealand startup will receive 12 months of tailored IT and cyber security services valued at $10,000. “We wanted to tie our birthday celebrations to show how we’re backing the future – supporting the next 40 years, if you like,” Driescher said. Overall, Advantage takes pride in still operating after 40 years, being locally owned and with the original owners and founders, Mark and Carol McGillivray, still involved as board director and shareholders.