MCR IT CEO, Sam Vakili
Since its inception 30 years ago, Sydney-based value-added reseller MCR Computer Resources has gone through the various different phases of the IT industry, a journey that has seen it finally shed 'Computer Resources' from its name and turn towards a new chapter in its ongoing story.
Since 1988, the IT services provider, which counts Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, Oracle and VMware, among others, as its vendor partners, has streamlined and managed IT assets for a wide range of Australian businesseswith.
Today, the company has a current focus on the managed services market, predominantly catering to the non-for-profit, small- to medium-sized business (SMB) and government sectors.
“When we first started we were dealing with Sun Microsystems, Unix and the P Series servers with IBM. It was a lot of hardware and infrastructure type of business and we morphed into a services business,” MCR CEO Vakili said.
“We’ve still kept a lot of our partnerships with companies like HPE, and we established partnerships with companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, and in areas like security with Palo Alto, Checkpoint and Fortinet,” he said.
“We shifted our focus in terms of where we were investing our resources and we changed from being box movers at the big end of town, to really focusing on small to medium enterprise, non-profits and looking at their whole cloud migration, specifically focusing on Microsoft and O365.
“It’s all about the value we can add on top of that with our services.”
Education, training and company culture have been some of the most challenging aspects of evolving the business model, according to Vakili.
“It’s very hard changing your own mindset, let alone other people’s mindset, and it takes a lot of energy coming from the leadership team to keep driving the message and the change of culture through the organisation,” he said. “It takes a lot of energy, effort and time to make those shifts.”
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Now, as it wraps up 30 years in business, the company turns towards its next chapter under a new brand.
MCR which initially stood for MIPS (millions of instructions per second) Computer Resources has rebranded to MCR IT -- (managed, cost effective, reliable).
“We thought we would make it a bit more relevant and easy to understand and it has been rebranded to MCR IT. One of the questions that we were always asked was what does MCR stand for? Not many people knew the answer,” Sam Vakili said.
And the company is continuing to expand and grow, with about 45 full time staff and will con. At one point, it also had an operations centre based in Papua New Guinea, which Vakili said it sold that side of the business, but it was looking to step back into that market again through a partnership it had established with ICT services company, Daltron.
“In PNG, we’re focusing on delivering a managed cyber security service, which we think is going to be quite successful,” he said.
Vakili also has his eye on the Canberra market, hiring two staff and recognising the potential business among small to medium enterprises in the region.
“There’s a lot of opportunities on the table and as far as we’re concerned, the market is really healthy and growing,” he said.
