Reddog Technology

In the early 2000's we could see a mismatch between our customers needs and our needs. Put simply, if we charged per hour to fix an IT issue, we made money while our customers lost money. We set about designing an IT company that succeeded when our customers did and didn't when their IT was broken. We designed a revolutionary (at the time) business model where our customers paid a flat fee per month for their ICT solutions and we provided unlimited support. It was an incredibly successful model. We expanded nationally within 12 months and went international within 18 months. Reddog Technology was sold in 2015.

 

Reddog Technology was a technology company that Nathan Aherne and Jason Rudolph (two of the executives of TecHaus) created in the early 2000's. In the early 2000's they could see a mismatch between their customers needs and the companies needs. Put simply, if they charged per hour to fix an IT issue, Reddog made money while their customers lost money. This incentivised low quality ICT work or worse, intentionally cheap ICT to get the job but that would pay much more in the longrun. Reddog set about designing an IT company that succeeded when its customers did and didn't when their ICT was broken. How they did this was to design a revolutionary (at the time) business model where our customers paid a flat fee per month for their ICT solutions and Reddog Technology provided unlimited support for their ICT. It was an incredibly successful model. Reddog Technology expanded across Australia within 12 months and went international within 18 months.

Reddog Technology owned and leased all equipment to its customers. First they needed to find and develop the products. One of the big issues with every product Reddog Technology developed was:

1. it needed to be incredibly reliable - unreliable products cost us and our customers money.
2. be scalable - it needed to work in a single person business, in a massive corporation, internationally, on a mine site
3. it needed to look good - people like to use products that look good.
4. It needed to have the lowest cost of ownership of any product on the market.

We developed all of our products and continually developed our own products to increase their features and reliability.

Data Centres and Mail Servers
We developed our own data centre infrastructure for our mail servers. We needed to develop custom mail servers because there was only one mail server product on the market at the time that could handle 40,000 emails in the inbox and not crash.

 

Phone systems
We developed our own VOIP phone systems. Most phone systems at the time were not VOIP and the VOIP systems that did exist were incredibly expensive and unreliable. We developed our own VOIP system, both the hardware and the software because not only did our VOIP system need to be reliable, it also needed to be installable by someone with no tech knowledge at a mine site, it needed to be replaceable by the company secretary and it needed to work whether the office had 8 people in it or 3,000. They also needed to be easily transportable and very hard to break.

Firewalls and Network security
We developed our own firewalls because there was nothing on the market at the time that was reliable enough for the price point we needed. We found custom hardware and then installed a customised version of pfsense on it. Everything about this product needed to be rock solid because not only was it how we kept everyone else out, it is also how we got into an managed our customers infrastructure.

Laptops and Computers
In the early 2000's everyone used Microsoft Windows and Blackberry phones. We could see that while Apple was behind right now, they were innovating at an incredible rate and would soon be able to compete with Microsoft. We had also crunched the numbers on our pricing and prediction algorithm and Apple had the lowest cost of ownership. So we gambled on using all Apple laptops and workstations. When we first started using Apple, they had an incredibly low quality version of Microsoft Office available for them, so instead of using that, we used Parallels with the real Microsoft Office installed on it and our customers loved it. Alternatively, we would install Microsoft Windows on the Apple laptops and customers loved it even more. They got a pretty laptop with all the features they wanted with unlimited support. We ate the increased cost while Apple caught up.

Portable Internet
In the early 2000's having portable internet through the 3G mobile network was incredibly expensive and very difficult to make it reliable. It wasn't possible to tether off your phone until well after 2008. Nathan and Jason created a relationship with a data centre provider who had a direct connection to Telstra's data centres. Our customers were able to connect using a 3G modem to Telstra, be routed to the data centre and get access to the internet that way. It was revolutionary for Brisbane at the time.

Phones
When we started Reddog Technology, everyone was using Blackberry for their business needs. As young up starts, Nathan and Jason felt the Blackberry was old technology. Apple came out with the iPhone in Australia in July 2008 and they promptly bought over 100 of them, which was incredibly difficult at the time. Below is a photo of 70 of the first iPhone 3Gs they received.

 

Asset Management
To operate Reddog Technology, Nathan and Jason had to develop a highly sophisticated pricing system, support ticket system and asset management system. They all needed to be integrated together so that the pricing system knew how much each asset was costing and it could update the predictions of pricing to real world values. Pricing predictions were made up to 4 years out from the purchase date of an asset. Because Reddog Technology owned and managed every piece of technology our customers used and our pricing system needed a rock solid asset management system, we had to build one ourselves. We looked for a number of years for an off the shelf product but nothing suited. Our asset management system managed millions of dollars of technology assets, from hardware to software, cables, drives, monitors and everything you can think of. Equipment was constantly being purchased and bought into the asset pool and equipment was constantly being returned by customers to be fixed and equipment was constantly reaching its average viable life and being retired from the asset pool.

Reddog Technology gave Nathan and Jason an incredible amount of real world experience while they were in their 20's. Nathan even won the Hot 30 under 30 for his work with Reddog Technology - link here

Jason and Nathan sold Reddog Technology in 2015.