Four things you didn’t know about SAS IT

Depending upon whom I speak with in NZ’s IT industry, they either are big fans of local cloud provider SASIT or haven’t heard of them. So I sat down with the company's CEO, Phil Martin to work out work out what we all should know:

The company was started in 1974

The founder Doug Brooker left IBM and started the business in 1974 as Systems Advisory Services Ltd. The focus was on software development especially around finance, manufacturing and distribution. This was a time before ‘Apps’ and most of the customers where running IBM AS/400 mainframes. Since then, the company has grown to over 50 team members today.

The focus has changed over time

While the company’s heritage started in software development, the main focus these days is on hosting critical systems for enterprise customers. More and more these organisations want a service provider to host, maintain and backup their existing databases & systems. SASIT has already had considerable success in this area and is focused on this growing area of outsourcing.

Stability and longevity

After working at Telecom and then running the systems group (think server hardware) at IBM, Phil Martin joined SASIT. He has been with the company for eight years. It’s rare to encounter management in the local IT industry that have had this type of stability.

Influential partnerships

In addition to its own data center in Greenlane, Auckland, the company partners with Datacom (for the Albany Orbit data center) and CCL (for the Christchurch CoLo data center) to meet customers’ diverse needs. Equipment also resides within customers’ own computer room environments not only in NZ but also in Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines and Australia

It has a close relationship with IBM & NetApp with many of it's customers end up having their critical systems hosted on the two vendors' hardware in SASIT’s data centers.

Backup and disaster recovery company Plan-B is an important partner also, especially around online offsite backup solutions and cold start hardware replacements.

SASIT is also partnered with many of the key system integrators in NZ as part of much larger support agreements.

Finally, and most interestingly, SASIT isn't on the hunt for hundreds of new customers. The company is so focused on service that they very rarely lose a customer and most years only look to add three or four new customers.

More information at www.sasit.co.nz