Part of the Powlec family — a business with real roots, not a startup guessing at what tradies and small business need.
It started with an electrical contracting business. Invoicing was done by hand back then, and deciphering the handwriting fell to my wife — enough of a tension point that I went and bought an NEC personal computer, right around the same time the original IBM PC came out. CPM86, 8-inch floppy disks, eventually a 10-megabyte hard drive the size of a shoebox with a cable trailing across the floor. That instinct — if something's broken, go and fix it with whatever tools exist — is the same instinct that's run through everything since.
That business grew into 42 employees specialising in compressed air control equipment and programmable logic controllers, with patented technology that ended up in Collins Class submarines, ANZAC frigates, and manufacturing plants across Australia and overseas. Running something that size means learning what actually breaks a business from the inside — quotes, estimating, customer data, keeping nothing slipping through the cracks when things get busy — and that's where the deeper technical grounding came from, not a classroom.
When it came time to pass that business on, the next chapter turned out to be teaching what all of that had taught me — as a project manager and specialist teacher at both Swinburne University and RMIT University, setting up the IT systems behind the teaching labs and introducing Ethernet networking to the industrial automation sector while it was still new ground. Different setting, same underlying work: build the systems, make them reliable, make them make sense to the people using them.
Somewhere in all of that, the case for cloud-based infrastructure became obvious. A tradie or a small business isn't in one place — today it's the workshop or the office, tomorrow it's a job three hours away or a meeting across town, the day after it's the truck or the car. And a physical server, whether it's sitting in your own premises or in someone else's data centre, is still a piece of hardware that has to be managed, that ages, that eventually breaks down — and when it does, the business stops until someone fixes it. Cloud infrastructure takes that single point of failure out of the equation entirely. One less thing that can bring a business to a halt — and one of the more important things to remove.
VBoX Web Services is where all of that lands. The tools have changed, but the job hasn't: understand what a business actually needs, then build it properly so the owner can stop worrying about IT and get on with running their business.
The same systems we run for our own family of businesses, applied to yours.
We're not a call centre reading from a script. We've built a business from nothing, grown it, taught it at a university level, and now we do the same thing for you.