By Nigel Austin, The Advertiser.
VITO Rinaldi runs a technology business that is light years away from the early days of the historic Royal Automobile Association building in which it is housed on Hindmarsh Square.
Information storage and handling work that would have required an army of thousands of people a century ago is undertaken by a team of just 35 people from Blue Crystal Solutions today.
Its clients include major utility companies with hundreds of thousands and even millions of customers in some cases, all requiring intensive record keeping in an efficient, cost-effective manner.
Since Mr Rinaldi founded Blue Crystal Solutions in 2004, working from a home office, it has gone from strength to strength in the database, application and cloud market for customers of all sizes in industries across Australia.
The first client, AGL, remains among more than 60 major national and state clients such as Energy Australia, the Australian Pipeline Authority, the South Australian Government, Santos, Melbourne Health and Victoria’s Alfred Hospital.
“The good thing is we’re bringing work from the eastern states to Adelaide because they appreciate our value, quality, reputation and the fact that we deliver exceptional results every time,” Mr Rinaldi said.
The growth is highlighted by winning four managed service contracts — each lasting for five years — for Melbourne hospitals in the past five months.
Mr Rinaldi said a catalyst for its growth came when it moved from Port Road, to a prime Adelaide central business district location in 2009 when he bought the National Trust-listed Royal Automobile Association building for his Adelaide head office.
“In what we do, it was appropriate to have a Central Business District location to reflect our success,” he said.
Mr Rinaldi is optimistic about continuing success and the potential to expand to 60 to 70 employees within the next three years.
A rapidly growing part of its future involves its range of cloud based services from migrating, enabling and supporting applications to go to the cloud, contributing about 20 per cent of the business and increasing every day.
“The way it is growing it will account for at least 60 to 70pc of our business within two or three years,” Mr Rinaldi said.
“Our cloud services helps our customers to develop technology strategies to drive their business forward, reduce costs and risks as well as improve the services they use and provide to their customers,” he said.
“Overall, the business turnover is growing by 10-12pc a year, helped by our focus in competing on the basis of efficiency.”
Mr Rinaldi said its proactive support services involve the continuous monitoring of its clients’ applications and systems to ensure they receive the best performance from their Cloud, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server investments. It is all managed by using its unique proactive database, application and cloud monitoring tool, BlueDiamond.
“BlueDiamond is an ideal package for organisations that require high availability and resilience as our dedicated team will ensure all systems are working effectively, overcoming any possible issues before they reach users,” he said.
“We are at the forefront of innovation in the world by investing in our support tools and developing proactive processes, checks and algorithms to monitor databases and cloud products for our customers.”
Mr Rinaldi said innovation has been a key as it continually improves and extends its range of products and services to stay at the forefront of industry trends and offer its customers the absolute best in database application and cloud management services.
The change from horse and cart days to the modern era has passed in a short time, but Blue Crystal Solutions is geared for an even brighter future through its ability to make information available forever through its cloud enablement practice.
View the original article in The Advertiser.
