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Gold Coast IT business Mercury IT carves out niche helping businesses - both big and small

A Gold Coast IT business has carved out a lucrative niche helping businesses — both big and small — adapt to a fast-changing digital environment without compromising on quality.

MERCURY IT has carved out a lucrative niche helping businesses, big and small, adapt to a fast-changing digital environment without compromising on quality.

The company was founded in 2004 by Luke Halliday and AJ Williams to provide support to businesses with their own IT departments and other firms with no specialised staff of their own.

It started from a one-bedroom apartment in Miami before moving to Surfers Paradise the following year and employing its first staff member.

In 2007 it shifted to its first real office space on Olsen Ave and three years later moved to Arundel where it is currently based with more than 40 full-time staff.

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Ex-Gold Coast Cabs CEO Martin O’Riordan, who has a Masters of Information Technology from the University of Southern Queensland, was brought into the business four years ago as general manager to lead the integration of three businesses into one.

Mercury had acquired two cloud-based computing businesses, Divest IT and LC9, in late 2014. Mr O’Riordan said the merger brought a range of challenges to the company.

“You have three different accounting, management and pricing structures, and then you are merging all those into one,” he said.

“It was a big challenge. When I started it was about pulling it all together into one seamless organisation, which is what we see today.”

Mr O’Riordan said the key was taking all staff towards a unified vision for the company.

“That is, success for our clients is our success,” he said.

“Realistically it has taken a lot of time, talking to staff, bringing them along, integrating them together, spending a lot of time to understand what their needs and wants are, to reach this goal.”

Mercury today has 130 clients, including Mr O’Riordan’s former company Gold Coast Cabs as well as South Coast Radiology, that it interacts with on a daily basis. It also consults to a number of other companies. Clients are located in Australia and New Zealand and include such industries as engineering, manufacturing, plumbing, logistics, transport and charities.

Mr O’Riordan said a recent challenge for the company was working with Gold Coast dental practice roll-up Smiles Inclusive, which operates under the Totally Smiles brand, before it listed on the stock exchange in April.

“It was a rapid rollout of a lot of sites in a very short time frame,” he said. “That was done to meet their actual listing requirements, to bring on board all those 52 practices within a specified time frame.

“We integrated every one of this separate businesses into one centralised system and in a lot of cases we needed to change the applications they were using. That was all done in three months.”

Mr O’Riordan said the future of the business involved adding more clients in Australasia (it has no plans for overseas expansion beyond NZ) and making sure it keeps up with the technology as it changes. “We are at the point where we can adapt very rapidly,” he said.

Original URL: https://www.goldcoastbulletin.com.au/business/gold-coast-it-business-mercury-it-carves-out-niche-helping-businesses-both-big-and-small/news-story/fd2e40216e9da83a4fbefee48e515b81