History

Working together at Hitachi Data Systems in the late 1990s, Revera founders Cockayne and Norrie operated within a classical US-centric multinational structure.

Their products – large-scale enterprise storage systems – were at the big end of town, which, in New Zealand, is a small market opportunity.

Revera’s genesis was based on a simple but profound paradigm shift – sharing IT rather than buying it outright. If too few businesses could afford to buy systems of their own, Cockayne and Norrie would find a way to bring customers to their systems, making IT much cheaper, with no less performance. Rather than selling just boxes, they developed a reliable technology platform that enabled businesses to operate their own IT systems from a single shared platform. In effect, a one-to-many model, delivered over a network, that sees many businesses plug into a single platform, but, in a practical sense, continue to get a discrete slice of IT, at a much lower cost. 

To realise their vision they bought out Hitachi, in 2002 acquiring a controlling stake and launching their company (then called Hosting and Data centre Services, or HdS). In 2005, following the completed buyout, HdS was renamed Revera.

Since then the business has been substantially reengineered and expanded to its position today as the leading New Zealand-owned provider of computing infrastructure and platform services.