December 2011

Interactive Team wins 2011 Masters Pro-Am

Interactive is proud to have been the sponsor of the 5th hole at the JBWere Masters golf tournament held at Victoria Golf Club - 15 to 18 December 2011.

In the Masters Pro-Am held on the Wednesday, Christopher Ride (Managing Director of Interactive), hosted customers Andrew Todd (CIO of IOOF) and Garry Whatley (CIO of Corporate Express) who were teamed with Queensland professional Adam Crawford. After some blistering golf and a combined best-ball score of 15 under par they won the tournament by 2 shots. "It was a great victory!" Ride commented. "Andrew Todd was on fire and whichever team he played with would certainly have won. Garry and Adam were excellent also."  

The official Masters tournament was won by enigmatic Englishman, Ian Poulter, who secured a three-shot victory over a strong field which included world number-one, Luke Donald. Happily, Adam Crawford's form continued into the main event and he finished the Masters in a solid fourth place at 7 under par. Well done Adam!

November 2011

The Roadshow moves to the cloud [Editorial] - ITwire

The Melbourne-based international entertainment group, Village Roadshow, has moved to the cloud with an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model built on NetApp and provided by Interactive so it can cope with its massive data growth.

Previously, Village Roadshow managed its own data centre at its Jam Factory headquarters in Melbourne, but due to continually increasing data demands, it was forced to seek alternative, more efficient IT solutions. The company engaged IT services provider, Interactive, whose Tier III data centre is built on NetApp, to provide an IaaS solution to alleviate Village its data management problems.

According to Village Roadshow CIO, David Kindlen the company’s data was growing at a “phenomenal rate,” and it was running out of space to store it. “We needed a high performance and scalable managed production storage solution that provided strong business continuity capabilities at a competitive price to an in-house purchase. I spoke with Interactive about setting up Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) utilising hardware from NetApp, with whom we already had technology that we were very happy with.”

Under the contract, all of Village Roadshow’s data is now stored on the NetApp FAS3170 storage system within Interactive’s Tier III data centre in Melbourne, and Kindlen says that since moving to the IaaS model, the company’s storage is fully flexible and easily able to cope with the continued data growth.

Click here to read more.

August 2011

Christopher Ride, Managing Director at Interactive, has been recognised among an exceptional group of entrepreneurs at the 2011 Southern region awards for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year program

The awards function was held on 11 August at The Forum Theatre in Melbourne.

Ride took out the Technology category for Victoria and Tasmania, progressing to the National Awards in November where he will compete against winners from four other regions across Australia for the coveted title of 2011 Australian Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

Ride has been recognised for his extraordinary achievements at Interactive, where he joined as a sales person in 1992. Upon taking the reins as Managing Director in 1999, Ride has seen the business grow from $10 million to $100 million in revenue, as well as the number of staff and products supported increase dramatically. He has also been responsible for embedding his customer service values into the organisation, by developing a list of Cultural Values to build a strong ethos within the company. In addition to his role at Interactive, Ride is a best-selling author, with two fiction novels published by Random House, The Schumann Frequency and The First Boxer.

Interactive also recently won the Australian Business Award for Service Excellence, recognising organisations that deliver outstanding customer service, with Interactive being selected as the winner from 236 entries in the category. Commenting on the Entrepreneur of the Year and Australian Business Awards wins, Ride said he was humbled by the recognition of both awards. He stressed that all of the success comes down to the staff at Interactive who have helped make his customer experience vision a reality.

“I am delighted to be acknowledged as a regional winner in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year program, however it is the staff at Interactive who have taken my philosophy for superior customer service and delivered it to our customers with such enthusiasm. It is this dedication to our customers that has taken Interactive to where we are today,” says Ride.

The National Award Ceremony for the 2011 Entrepreneur of the Year program will be held on 17 November, at Peninsula in Melbourne.

August 2011

Interactive signs 3-year sponsorship deal with North Melbourne Football Club

"We are proud to be associated with North Melbourne Football Club (NMFC) and their Head Coach, Brad Scott" commented Interactive Managing Director, Christopher Ride. "North Melbourne's core values are hard work and professionalism and we consider that is a perfect sporting mantra to be associated with. We honestly think NMFC has the best brand within the AFL".

The 3-year sponsorship deal provides significant Interactive branding around the coaches box and signage around Etihad Stadium, as well as branding on all the NMFC computer equipment. In addition, Interactive's sponsorship provides unparalleled access for our customers and staff to events within the football club as well as with the core coaching group. Interactive is also proud to be a long standing cloud computing provider to NMFC.  

For more information on the North Melbourne Football Club visit www.kangaroos.com.au

August 2011

Interactive Wins 2011 Australian Business Award for Service Excellence [Editorial] - iTWire

Interactive, has been recognised among Australia’s most progressive organisations, winning the Australian Business Award for Service Excellence in the 2011 Awards.

The Australian Business Award for Service Excellence recognises organisations that deliver outstanding customer service, with Interactive being selected as the winner from 236 entries in the category.

Commenting on the win, Simon Durkin, Director of Sales at Interactive said, "It is great to be recognised for providing a superior customer experience, which is the foundation on which Interactive was established".

“Our people are the key to delivering service excellence and we continue to place a large focus on employing people with outstanding customer service skills. We get to know our customers’ business objectives and goals, and we pride ourselves on working with them as business partners rather than just service providers,” said Durkin.

Now in its sixth year, the Australian Business Awards program recognises organisations that demonstrate the core values of business excellence, product excellence, corporate responsibility, sustainability and commercial success in their respective industries. A total of 103 recipients were honoured from the 928 organisations that participated in the 2011 Awards.

July 2011

Managed IT contract pays off before first bill is paid [Editorial] - Voice & Data

Baker IDI is a leading health and medical research institute, dedicated to reducing ill health and mortality caused by the effects of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

The need for reliable IT servers is paramount to the work done within the institute, with invaluable research data that needs to be readily accessible at all times.

It was for this reason that Baker IDI turned to Australian systems availability specialist Interactive, to supply critical maintenance support to the out-of-warranty IBM server equipment at its Prahran head office and additional IT equipment in Alice Springs.

“Interactive provided the perfect solution to our problem, providing a straightforward hardware maintenance agreement which ensured our equipment would be supported by dedicated engineers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” says Dalton.

“We had to utilise Interactive's services before the ink had dried on our contract and before we'd even paid our first bill; the turnaround was fantastic. It immediately confirmed to my team and I that we'd chosen the right company - we were really impressed with the responsiveness of the team and the knowledge of the on-ground engineer,” Dalton says.

Click here to read more.

June 2011

The First Boxer - IT man by day, author by night

Some people watch television at night after work. Others play tennis or do crosswords. Christopher Ride (’82) writes novels.

After a peripatetic journey through his youth, Christopher Ride is now CEO of IT company, Interactive. His alter ego as an author helps him temporarily to leave the unwired world of IT - even if it is just for an hour or two.

Click here to read more.

April 2011

Seek sought and found hardware provider [Editorial] - The Australian IT

Interactive tailored a service level agreement to meet Seek’s dynamic and changing business needs.

Mithran Naiker, Infrastructure Services manager at Seek discusses the inflexible service and extensive delays they experienced from hardware service warranties prior to engaging Interactive for hardware maintenance support.

Interactive delivers industry-leading response times, specialist IT and engineering skills, rigorous maintenance schedules and full local parts availability. Interactive provided a guaranteed two-hour on-site response compared with four hours from Seek's previous supplier.

"We looked around at the market and Interactive seemed to be the most complete provider—they do network and they do servers," Naiker says. Since being supported by Interactive, Seek has significantly reduced the cost of maintenance for servers.

The article also appeared online in The Australian IT Online.

Click here to read more.

March 2011

Interactive to invest $50m in data centres [Editorial] - IT News

Interactive has revealed plans to spend $50 million building the first phase of a new data centre in Melbourne and expanding an existing facility in Sydney's north.

The IT services company also commenced a fast-tracked $10 million expansion of its existing Melbourne data centre in Port Park this week.

Managing director Christopher Ride told iTnews the fitout of the last remaining floor space in Port Park had been brought forward to meet customer demand for infrastructure-as-a-service and other managed service offerings.

"We left space on the ground floor [of Port Park] for a data centre expansion," Ride said. "It was always planned in the initial build [but] we were really thinking it would be a 2012/13 project.

"We had to bring it forward by two years to meet the demand and beat the current providers in the marketplace."

The expansion of Port Park added 200 racks of technical floor space with 2N redundancy. More than half of the new racks were sold before the new data floor became "active" on Monday this week.

Click here to read more.