We didn't learn your systems on your site.

What we actually are

ClubIT is a locally owned and managed technology company, not a general IT provider with some clients who happen to be clubs. We serve four sectors — clubs and gaming, general practice and primary health, Aboriginal community controlled health, and aged care — plus allied health, across Northern NSW, the Gold Coast, regional NSW and Sydney.

What those sectors share is the thing that defines how we work: an outage has a person on the other end of it. A club's gaming floor at 8pm on a Friday. A waiting room at 9am on a Tuesday. A medication round at 7:30am. None of those are inside business hours, and all of them are when failure costs the most.

Today that is more than 1,000 workstations and servers under management across 180+ client organisations, and a team of software specialists, infrastructure engineers, auditors and consultants rather than a bench of generalists.

How it started

With one club, in the Northern Rivers.

Ben Smith started ClubIT after seeing what ageing technology was doing to clubs in the region — systems that could not talk to each other, vendors who each owned a piece and nobody who owned the outcome. The first client was a single club. The work was onsite, hands-on, and specific to an industry almost nobody else was bothering to learn properly.

By 2010 the same pattern had turned up in aged care and allied health: regulated sectors, specialised software, thin internal IT, and a lot at stake when something stops. We built teams for those sectors rather than stretching the club team across them, and we added offices in the Clarence Valley and, most recently, Sydney.

The strategy has not really changed since the first club. Go deep in a small number of industries, learn their systems properly, and be close enough to turn up.

What makes us different, stated plainly

We know your industry, not just IT

We speak the language — SwiftPOS, Micropower, eBET, MedicalDirector, Best Practice, Communicare, PenCS — and we know the regulatory and operating pressures that sit behind them. We also carry what we learn from one client in a sector to the rest of it, which is something a provider with three clients in your industry cannot do.

Customer first, and specific about it

Over a decade of work in dental, aged care, podiatry, general practice and community health means our recommendations start from how the work actually runs, not from a product catalogue. We tell you what is wrong, including when the answer is spend money, and including when a previous recommendation of ours did not work.

A genuinely mixed team

Software developers, infrastructure and network engineers, cyber specialists, a qualified ISO 27001 auditor, and client-facing consultants. We write software, which is unusual for a provider our size and is why we can build the missing piece rather than wait for a vendor to ship it. The clearest evidence is NEVO Pulse — our own client portal, deployed to every NEVO client.

Where we operate

Three offices:

• Alstonville, Northern NSW — the head office, and where the 21 years, the 180+ clients and the aged-care and health depth were built. Onsite within 20 minutes for urgent calls across Ballina, Alstonville, Lennox Head and Wollongbar, and the base we serve the Gold Coast from
• Grafton — an office with people in it, covering Grafton, Maclean, Yamba and the Clarence Valley. A provider driving in from Coffs Harbour or the Gold Coast is two hours away when something needs hands on it
• Kogarah, Sydney — our Sydney office, with Sydney-based staff, in the middle of the St George district

We are careful about how we describe all three, because a club board can tell the difference between a real presence and a phone number. See locations for addresses, maps and exactly what exists where.

The people, and what they actually know

This is the part a generic provider cannot reproduce, so it is worth being specific.

Ben Smith — Managing Director

• Has written software that integrates with Aristocrat systems, on and off across 20 years
• Has worked with SwiftPOS since its first version in the 1990s
• Worked alongside the original developer of the eBET Turbo system
• Built a club loyalty platform from scratch in the mid-2000s
• ISO 27001 Qualified Auditor (PwC); former Chair, Ballina Shire Council Internal Audit and Risk Committee

Kevin Miller — Operations Manager

• Has used Medical Director since version 1.0
• 20 years working with GP practice software — the clinical, billing and integration behaviour, not just the install
• Runs ClubIT operations, so the practice knowledge sits with the person accountable for delivery rather than in a separate consulting layer

Edwin Tumangan — Senior Technical Lead

• Taught platform and security at university level — the subject, to students, before it was a product category
• A decade working in IT since, so the theory is backed by delivery
• Enterprise background including IBM and Accenture
• Means architecture and security decisions are reviewed by someone who taught the fundamentals, not only someone who holds the vendor certificate

How we work

Everything we do is delivered under one operating model, NEVO: managed technology designed to improve, not just maintain. Three parts — Support, Secure, Grow — delivered through four stages over ninety days, against a roadmap you agreed to.

And there is no lock-in: NEVO carries a 90-day guarantee. Give us 90 days, and if you are not satisfied, cancel and we refund our fees. You keep the audit, the report and every improvement we made.

The way to test any of this is to have us in for a Technology Review and read what we write about your environment. It is $1,500 including GST, it takes one to two hours onsite, and the report is yours to keep whatever you decide.