Computer One Pty Ltd

Overview

About

Computer One is a Brisbane managed services provider founded in 2003 by James Walker, who started the business with his business partner Greg Nunn, the owner of outdoor equipment company Mountain Designs. Walker's path into IT was unusual: he came from the hospitality industry, where he managed several of Brisbane's best-known pubs and nightclubs, but he had been the go-to person for IT support since primary school and was working on the IT side of things even during his hospitality years. He started Computer One hot on the heels of the Y2K period and has run it as Founder and Managing Director ever since, setting the strategic direction and staying closely involved in the technical development of the company and in new projects for clients. The company's headquarters is at Level 5, 488 Queen Street, Brisbane QLD 4000, and it has grown beyond Queensland with offices at 133 Castlereagh Street in Sydney and 180 Lonsdale Street in Melbourne, a move Walker has described as a natural progression since many of its clients have a presence in those states. The team numbers in the range of 11 to 50 people, and an industry profile put the figure at 31 employees with growth gathering pace from 2012 onward. Over the years the company has taken on many projects in the mining and mining services sector across Brisbane and Perth, and Walker says what the company really excels at is "doing difficult IT well": delivering and supporting technology in remote locations where communication and bandwidth are genuinely difficult. Clients reach the company on 1300 667 871 or through computerone.com.au, and the company keeps a LinkedIn profile under the name Computer One Pty Ltd.

Computer One's services cover managed IT from end to end. The service desk handles the daily requests of client staff, while monitoring watches systems continuously so faults are caught early. The cyber security work includes security audits for both Australian and multinational companies, and Walker has spoken publicly about the scale of the threat: he has said there are at least 15 major channels through which data can leak out of an organisation, and that security is now a specialist subset of IT management, closer to the difference between a GP and a surgeon than to general IT. The cloud services help clients move workloads to hosted platforms, disaster recovery services prepare them to restore systems after failures, and infrastructure projects cover the design and rollout of networks, servers and related systems. The IT strategy and advisory work gives clients a plan for where their technology should go, procurement and hardware services source the equipment, automation reduces repetitive manual work, and onsite support puts engineers physically in front of problems when remote work is not enough. The company's vendor partnerships include VMware, CA, Cisco, Citrix, ConnectWise and Datto. Walker himself is a keen sailor who has competed in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race as a navigator, a role that involves making key decisions on weather and course while spending long hours below deck, and in 2019 he helped his crew to third place overall even after breaking his wrist when a large wave hit halfway through the race.