Silverfern IT's 30+ year heritage

Why history matters to IT buyers

The history of a service provider is actually a big deal for IT buyers. History is better than price as an indicator of service quality.

Not surprisingly, the collective history of IT companies is littered with dinosaur skeletons. Most were locked on to one technology and didn’t move with a fast-changing field.

Silverfern IT has been in the IT business for over 30 years, not just 30 years as a corporate entity, but 30 years under the same leadership.

Liong Eng as founder/CEO and several key managers and engineers with long histories continue to position Silverfern IT at the leading edge amongst their peers.

Silverfern IT has been able to thrive for over three decades by constantly anticipating the big changes and moving quickly to turn them into a competitive advantage for their clients.

While competitors have tried to sell what they have an agency for, or a warehouse full of, Silverfern IT has been able to deliver a long-term strategy, backed by an understanding of the trends and the skills, to achieve the best from every stage of IT evolution.

To retain clients over a decade or two is real evidence that Silverfern IT develops meaningful partnerships with its clients. Partnerships are built around capacity and results, not products and price.

Superficially, IT is a young person’s game, and many young people have burst onto the scene with a single new idea, but a new idea in IT lasts only a few years at best. To be able to read the sector and be at the forefront, wave after wave is a rare skill, and it’s Liong’s strong suit.

The leadership history of all the great technology companies – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, and even Australia’s own Atlassian – demonstrates the value of being there for the long term – and learning from it.

“Silverfern IT gives SME’s tools and support to operate more efficiently – to get more done, with fewer errors – and to maintain that advantage over time.” Liong says. “That was the vision in 1991, and it is still the vision today. The tools we use have changed dramatically, several times over, but not our customer focus.”

The stand-out characteristic that sets Silverfern IT apart from the ever-changing flow of small IT suppliers is a commitment to employ qualified, experienced computer engineers, investing in them with ongoing training, and backing them with deep resources.

“Self-taught IT people know what they have learned on client systems,” says Liong. “When there’s something new that they don’t know, they resort to trial and error. They don’t have a knowledge of the underlying theory to fall back on. When these businesses try to expand, without quality control and support systems, it all falls apart.

“We are still here. Thirty years and we are the strongest we have ever been. We are creating our golden years, not living off the memory of them.”

The trends Silverfern IT is acting on now include applying advanced AI and machine learning to service applications used by SMEs; data and process automation for daily activities and the first applications of data warehousing and big-data analysis that are cost-effective for SMEs.

Some trends may seem circular. Early high capital investment in servers, storage, networking, and other hardware has shifted over the past decade to the cloud, where lock-in capital investment is replaced by usage-based fees. Silverfern IT is developing custom hybrid systems where local hardware-based resources integrate with the public cloud.

“In IT, one size or one model seldom fits all,” Liong explains. “There are cost savings and efficiency gains in customizing IT to the needs of individual sites and processes. In many cases, there are cost and efficiency gains in having some tech in-house.”

The biggest current trend however is IT Security.

“Managers have been slow to appreciate just how exposed they are and how catastrophic the consequences can be,” explains Liong. “Back-room hackers have morphed into sophisticated, well-resourced global enterprises and even state-backed actors.

“Our laws, authorities, and politicians are powerless to stop the surge in hacking-as-a-business. Companies are starting to wake up to this, that they have to take responsibility to protect themselves.

“Fortunately at Silverfern IT, we have been focusing on developing our security services for several years in anticipation of the evergrowing threats. If you want enterprise-grade, IBM-quality security at an SME level, Silverfern IT is your best choice.”