Hostech aims to dominate regional SME IT&T services market

Stuart Corner
Friday, 26 March 2010 16:39

IT Industry - Strategy

Soon to become executive chairman of Hostech (ASX: HTC), Peter Kazacos, has an ambitious goal for the company: to have it become the default provider of telecommunications and IT services for small and medium enterprises in regional Australia.

He argues that there is a market crying out for the services Hostech plans to offer. "Small business are realising they need to rely more on their IT and telecoms to do business, whereas before it was ancillary now it is key," he told iTWire. "And some of them are still relying on backyard systems."

His strategy is to garner customers by providing standard telecoms services along with management of their in-house IT and, as the NBN rolls out, to move these customers away from in-house based systems to cloud-based services.

It's been the focus of PKBA, the company he and others set up in 2007 after he had sold Kaz to Telstra, and it has seen the company grow to annualised revenues of $40m. Now he is poised to fold the business and three others into Hostech to take the plan to the next stage.

Hostech shareholders will vote on 30 March on a planned acquisition by Hostech of Anittel (the renamed PKBA) and three other regional IT services companies: Accord Technologies, Axxis and Aspirence.

Kazacos told iTWire that Anittel had been in negotiations with these companies for some time when the opportunity of joining forces with Hostech came up.

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