Microsoft partner Apache upgrades North Queensland Cranes to the cloud

Stephen Goodson, the long-time IT manager of Mackay-headquartered North Queensland Cranes (NQCranes), decided the time had come to overhaul the IT systems of the growing company.The decision was more than reasonable: Goodson is one-man IT team so when the company's aged systems run into trouble he's always the one to fix them, making it almost impossible for him to take a much-needed break.That's a sub-optimal for NQCranes, as it supplies and services cranes and hoists across Australia and in Papua New Guinea, and has a team of 100 staff servicing 15,000 pieces of equipment.With the company growing and the systems not getting newer, Goodson knew it was time to rethink the underpinning tech and migrate to the cloud to make it more scalable and maintain business continuity.Goodson met Microsoft partner Apache and its director Rob Garsia at Telstra Vantage in 2016 as he was looking for someone to help kickstart the migration.We thought we were a good match, so we had a bit of a chat about what the objectives were and [NQCranes] basically needed both business continuity and scalability,” Garsia told CRN.