Good old fashioned IT reseller values – RealIT

Eight years ago a little idea formed. An IT reseller that could offer a much wider offering than the average box dropper.

Kyle Greig started RealIT in 2007 with his business partner Dean Bezuidenhout joining in 2009 initially as an employee and then later becoming a shareholder.

The business is split into three parts, a traditional IT reseller base, web development and VoIP as additional offerings. The latter of which is actually called RealVoIP.

Dean, with a background running an IT reseller in South Africa, handles half of the IT clients and has a specialty interest in web development, while Kyle handles the other half of the IT client base and specialises in the VoIP side.

These two directors are complemented with six other team members mainly in technical roles. While the plan is for every team member to have level-one technical certifications in all of their key products, each has a specialty area that they typically focus on.

The RealVoIP business offers hosted 3CX PBX options with either Yealink or Cisco phones and Plantronics headsets being recommended.

This VoIP specialisation started a bit later than the rest, with a realisation that many customers are caught between two suppliers (one IT and one VoIP) who both blame each other for issues. The pair says they've also witnessed clients having to purchase networking equipment twice, once from the IT reseller and later from the VoIP supplier.

Kyle wanted to provide a one-stop shop that could finally take responsibility for support and avoid double purchases.

"We saw increasingly that these two systems were working side by side and adding more value to what we were bringing our customers," Kyle says of their reasoning of incorporating VoIP into their offering.

The company actually hosts their own cloud-based 3CX PBX implementation for their VoIP clients, avoiding the need for on-premise equipment entirely. This is charged on a monthly subscription basis with the calls. It's all setup with enterprise-grade equipment in New Zealand.

While they also offer internet connections like fibre to clients, although it's not a requirement that clients switch over existing connections to use their VoIP services.

On the IT side they're really client centric, which means that clients aren't pushed to move to the cloud if it isn't the right thing for them. Meaning that they've got a spread of customers with on premises equipment, a hybrid and some with a full cloud-based business solution.

They partner with HP, Lenovo and soon to be Dell on the IT hardware side with Microsoft and their two cloud-based solutions Office 365 and Azure on the cloud side, and either Hyper V or VMWare on the virtualisation side.

Flexirent is their partner of choice for finance, an example of the company's old fashioned values. From their perspective, Flexirent is the most ethical of the finance companies, with Kyle saying, "from an IT reseller point of view, there's no hoops for us to jump through, it's transparent and easy.

It's a tough road to differentiate a IT reseller business these days with similar products and services to competitors. The RealIT - RealVoIP teams admit this and instead focus on bringing together these three offerings with good old-fashioned customer service.

A team that cares about your business outcomes and finally is the organisation that takes responsibility when things go wrong.