Christchurch's iTOPS finds stability on shaky ground

Josh Brown was on the second floor of a customer’s four-storey building near Christchurch’s Cashel Mall when the “big one” struck in February

By Darren Greenwood, Auckland | Monday, 29 August 2011
Josh Brown was on the second floor of a customer’s four-storey building near Christchurch’s Cashel Mall when the “big one” struck in February. Brown, the owner of IT services and consultancy company, iTOPS, says it was “pretty crazy” inside the building that day.

“There are lots of lucky people in Christchurch,” he says, including himself. His business was also fortunate to have been spared in the calamity. And since then, iTOPS, has been working to get other companies back on their feet.

“We have had jobs like blowing out the inside of servers of dust and mortar, and recovering a server from a hard drive thrownout of a building,” he says. “The earthquakes have brought variety and pressure [to his business].”

Brown has had a varied career. He graduated from Canterbury University with a degree in Forestry Science, but his OE eventually landed him behind a service desk for AT&T Unisource, in London in 1998.

“After that job, there was no turning back,” he says. “It was an excellent introduction [to IT] a big company, great systems, cool culture.”

He then moved to Sydney to attend the University of Technology, then travelled through Asia and the US. He landed a job with Taos, an IT outsourcer near San Francisco.

“I worked for a number of tech start-ups, but US-sized start-ups with hundreds of staff, some literally burning through a million dollars a week. For a guy into technology, this was Mecca and very cool. But nothing lasts forever and the tech bubble burst,” he says.

Every start-up Brown worked with failed. Taos laid off 480 of its 600 staff. The attack on the Twin Towers was “the final straw” that bought him back to New Zealand.

Brown had it in mind to break out on his own, but worked for five years at Compaq/HP as a software configuration and systems manager before launching iTOPS in 2006. The company provides systems and network management, support, security and data protection. It is a small company, with a team of three. But it has big customers, including HP, located mostly in Christchurch, where iTOPS is based.

“We’ve had a lot of technology companies as customers, although these have been overtaken by companies in professional services,” Brown says.

The company focuses on Microsoft, VMware, Cisco and HP solutions, and provides project-based consultancy, but also offers “one-stop-shop” for IT services.

Brown once perceived Christchurch businesses as reserved and “under-invested” in regard to IT. The quakes though have introduced a new dynamic. Customers are implementing new gear and taking cloud services more seriously.

He says that ShadowProtect and VMware have proved invaluable to get servers up and running quickly again. However, iTOPS doesn’t “particularly push products as our focus is on services. At present we’re in the process of redoing our website and a new helpdesk system”, Brown says Christchurch is easy to get around and supplies accessible, despite the damaged infrastructure. The company buys through Exeed, Ingram Micro, Datastor and Express Data.

Looking ahead, he says that since many of his customers are in temporary accommodation, he will have to help them move again. With all the money necessary to rebuild Christchurch, Brown isn’t sure how much the city’s smaller businesses will invest in IT services. Although there is some doubt about future prospects, he has no plans to leave.

“Commitment to Christchurch was not a question until recently. But as freak an event as these earthquakes were to Christchurch, you might as well ask how committed [you are] to New Zealand or any place. Disasters happen and clearly they can happen anywhere,” he says.