In a sector that has been calling out for the last decade or more for skilled, well-trained staff, Prodigi Technology Services founder Dan Faulknor has found a niche that enables more New Zealand businesses to access highly specialised IT skills without needing to employ full-time staff to carry out that work.
“We frequently work as virtual team members for our clients to supplement their existing in-house IT staff,” Faulknor says.
“Our skill set tends to be around more specialist work that doesn’t have to be done within a business on a continual basis, or gets overlooked in the everyday processes of an in-house IT team who are often focused on user support calls, setups of hardware for new staff members and general maintenance and operations tasks.”
“We come in to assist with specific projects such as setting up a new WAN for a business, reviewing and restructuring systems to fit better with the way a business has evolved, recommending and implementing new technologies, finding ways to run systems more cost-efficiently and more.”
Founded in 2013 under the name Internet by Design, Prodigi Technology Services was established by Dan Faulknor to provide a range of IT and web development services to clients New Zealand-wide.
Faulknor says one example of a business Prodigi has worked with in this capacity for several years now is the VetNZ group of vet clinics located in Southland, West Coast and Morrinsville.
With more than 250 staff nationwide, the business has an in-house IT team of six people lead by Head of Information Services John Driver, who says they have found a lot of value in the services provided by Prodigi.
“We were with a large Internet as a Service provider and had been that way for a number of years. We worked with Prodigi to find a better fit infrastructure solution. We went through a significant project with WAN and then Infrastructure as a Service. Both of those projects involved a change of provider, and Prodigi was the winning provider.”
Driver says one of the things he appreciates most about working with Prodigi is the level of flexibility to fit within the company’s business objectives, and not want to take all aspects of their IT support.
“That was where the gold was with Prodigi – we had previously struggled to find that balance of the stuff we were wanting to manage in-house with outsourcing. The other providers we worked with tended to want to grab everything. We found a much better balance with Prodigi.”
“We’ve seen tangible benefits from a cost perspective and from a service perspective. The service solution we have with Prodigi for infrastructure is much more flexible than what we have had previously, so it can flex as we grow or shrink some of that legacy infrastructure.”
Faulknor regularly joins VetNZ’s remote team meetings to contribute his expertise as needed, providing specialist advice on a range of topics.
The option of providing specialist IT resource to companies with or without internal IT teams enables a larger number of companies to benefit from expertise that is highly in demand.
From its inception, Prodigi was set up to work remotely and deliver services and support to clients anywhere in the world. As a result, they currently have clients across New Zealand, Australia, North America and Europe.
“We have staff based in Invercargill, Dunedin and Christchurch, and server infrastructure in Auckland, Sydney and Kansas – so we can deliver specialist IT services as needed to our clients anywhere in the world,” Faulknor says.
