A supportive partnership

Provoke Solutions started business 13 years ago with five people, one PC and an empty office in central Wellington. CEO Mason Pratt says the five founders each tipped in $5000 of their own money, asked the bank to match the investment and spent it on a year's rent and a single computer.

Today the company employs more than 100 people with offices in Singapore, Manila, Seattle and Auckland as well as headquarters in Wellington.

Pratt says the company came out of Glazier Systems - a small client server shop operating out of Wellington in the 1990s. One of that company's directors was Rod Drury, who now runs Xero.

Provoke's founders, Pratt, with Brendon Ford, Doug Taylor, Gabrielle Lovering and David ten Have, left Glazier after that business was acquired by the Advantage Group. It went from being a small, tightly knit and highly focused start-up to part of a much larger operation - not necessarily a bad thing, just not where Provoke's founders wanted to be.

Pratt says they wanted to recreate the good things about Glazier in the new business: the culture and the exclusive focus on supporting Microsoft products and services.

He says the culture is still there and so is the relationship with Microsoft. Provoke is so embedded as a Microsoft partner that Pratt says the company often finds itself brokering relationships between different parts of the software giant. It helps to have an office in Microsoft's hometown, Seattle.

Provoke's timing was good. In 2001 the idea of user-centric software design was only starting to get traction. Pratt says over the years the company has worked to maintain a balance between design and technology.

For most of its history Provoke has been about pulling together Microsoft technologies for its customers and packaging them in easy-to-use, attractive looking ways. This can mean, for example, building complex websites. The company numbers The All Blacks, Xero and Telecom among its customers. The complete list is a roll-call of well-known New Zealand brand names. Provoke's customer list also includes Microsoft.

To describe Provoke as a loyal Microsoft partner is putting it mildly. As Pratt says "we dog food ourselves". This can mean signing up for and using Microsoft products or services long before they hit the market.This can be painful, but it tends to pay dividends - there are Microsoft products Provoke knows better than most Microsoft employees.

Take the company's Lync communications service - think of it as a business class version of Skype. Pratt says Provoke was the first New Zealand organisation to use Lync: "In the early days there were challenges - not least bandwidth problems between Wellington and Auckland. Today, three product generations later it has made such a huge impact on the business that we now think of video as the most natural way of communicating."

Microsoft has always been better at partnering with small companies than most of its rivals. Yet Pratt says in the past 18 months Microsoft has renewed its efforts to get closer to partners. One part of this is an emphasis on joint-development and, what the company calls 'co-selling'.

Getting up to scale has been a challenge for Provoke; the business has been self-funded, which is a constraint when it comes to bulking up. It became easier in recent years thanks to Microsoft's Azure Cloud Computing service. Pratt says the technology's robustness helps underpin Provoke's growth. And the costs help. He says Azure cloud storage is about a quarter of traditional costs and there's no need to worry about capital expenditure.

Starting small

Provoke began with5 people 1 PC and 1 empty office; now they have more than 100 staff.