May 2006

Strategic 100

Strategic 100 Overview - 25 most strategically important New Zealand IT vendors.

Revera was formally known as Hosting & Datacentre Services (HdS), and prior to that, Hitachi Data Systems New Zealand. But in late 2005, owners Roger Cockayne and Wayne Norrie acquired the remaining 49% shareholding from Japan's Hitachi Data Systems, taking total control of the company and announcing a new name and corporate identity.

The company's computing infrastructure provision and VDC® (virtual data centre) services continue to comprise the major share of the business, delivered from twin data centre facilities in Auckland and Wellington and five Australian facilities, through an agreement with Leighton Group subsidiary Nextgen.

Cockayne, Revera Group managing director, says the completed buyout has opened up new opportunities , with the company recently announcing reseller agreements with NetApp, Sun and a broader strategic alliance with HP for both storage and infrastructure provision. The company continues to be a platinum partner of Hitachi.

"We have a significant legacy as storage experts. To effectively leverage this experience into full IT infrastructure design, build and associated management services, we needed to offer a broader range of server, storage and data centre management tools and technologies to our customers"

Cockayne says Revera needs capital to support all this growth, and is "gearing up all aspects of the company as if we are going for an IPO". He says the company has also broadened its services into the desktop space. "We'd always restrict ourselves to pure infrastructure provision, but our clients kept asking us to do the lot."

It recently closed a multi-million dollar deal with legal firm Minter Ellison Rudd Watts to manage the company's entire IT operation that also included desktop management.

But Cockayne says Revera's sweet spot is in being a computer infrastructure provider, and will invest heavily in this space over the next year.

"When people change their businesses they don't want to be bothered with scaling IT and struggling with more wires, boxes and predictability issues. With purpose-built facilities like ours, businesses simple need to change network connections - there's no IT imprint on the business."