World vision

Thinking big: Andrew Thomas, co-founder and managing director, Thomas Duryea

Company: Thomas Duryea Consulting

Rank: 7 (2008: 6, 2007: 18)

Chief executive: Andrew Thomas

Founded: 2000

Revenue 2008-09: $35.80 million

Growth: 157.36 per cent

Secrets of success: We hire for passion, energy, drive and initiative above all else. Our people are the key to our success.

Chalking up its third consecutive year on the BRW Fast 100 list, Melbourne technology services company Thomas Duryea Consulting is well on the way to fulfilling its founders' dream of becoming one of Australia's largest information technology services providers.

"I always set out to run a large company, not a small company," Thomas Duryea managing director Andrew Thomas said last year. "I don't see why we can't create a large globally competitive IT company from Australia, and I believe we can be that company."

Started in 2000 by four university friends - Andrew Thomas, Evan Duryea, David Stagg and Micah Smith - Thomas Duryea Consulting initially grew slowly while establishing a customer base by offering fairly generic IT support services, but in 2005 began to focus on what was then a little-known technology called server virtualisation.

The technology makes it possible to run several software applications on a single large server, enabling companies to slash the cost of running and maintaining data centres.

This decision was to prove crucial to the subsequent four years of sustained rapid growth. Thomas Duryea made its debut on the list in 2007, having tripled its revenue from $2.84 million in 2005-06 to $9.96 million. It repeated the performance in 2008 as its revenue shot up to $30.15 million. While growth has slowed in the past 12 months, the company has still managed to boost its revenue 19 per cent to $35.8 million.

The company estimates it has saved its clients more than $4.5 million in hardware costs, and more than $1 million in power bills, since it began to offer server virtualisation technology.

"IT managers gained a heavier proportion of the financial management spotlight over the past 12 months, and are experiencing more pressure to meet business challenges and higher service levels, with a tighter budget," Thomas says. "Organisations were looking at how they can run their IT operations a lot more efficiently, and because we provide proven cost savings on non-discretionary expenditure, we continued to acquire customers."

Thomas and the three other founders remain strongly involved with the business, and are not considering exiting at this stage, either through a market listing or a takeover.

"If we were to seriously consider an initial public offer, it would be to help our organisation through the next phase of the growth cycle," Thomas says. "By investing in new internal systems, as well as new technologies and services to take to the market, we would gain the ability to maintain large growth through innovation."

Thomas believes there is enough demand for the company's services to sustain strong growth.

"We had gone through a period of very rapid growth, so over the past year we didn't increase our head count as much as we did the year before, at least until the last couple of months," Thomas says.

"We have been on an aggressive hiring campaign since the start of June, and we see growth as one of the most important ways to retain staff, providing new opportunities for promotion and movement within the company."

With 79 staff and a target of 50 per cent growth over the next 12 months, by this time next year Thomas Duryea Consulting may well make it into the 1 per cent of Australian IT companies with more than 100 employees.

Thomas expects the next phase of the company's growth to be based on managed services, where Thomas Duryea effectively becomes the IT department for a company or organisation.

Although 95 per cent of Australian IT businesses never grow beyond 20 staff, Thomas believes managed services will enable Thomas Duryea to emulate the success of large global peers such as EDS, CSC and Fujitsu.

"The sky is the limit in terms of our growth," Thomas says.

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