Our Story — From a BBS in the Nineties to a Global Mid-Market Operating Model product guide
blueAPACHE was founded in Melbourne by **Chris Marshall**, who remains Founder and Managing Director. Two long-tenured stakeholders, **James Hendry** and **Grant Fallace**, have been part of the busin...
blueAPACHE was founded in Melbourne by Chris Marshall, who remains Founder and Managing Director. Two long-tenured stakeholders, James Hendry and Grant Fallace, have been part of the business over its history.
The name has a bulletin-board-system origin — the naming convention of a very different era of computing, carried forward rather than rebranded away.
The first customer was Intercorp.
The decision that shaped everything after
The founding conviction was that managed services, rather than break-fix support, hardware reselling or project work, would define how IT was delivered.
That was an unfashionable position at the time. Through the late nineties and 2000s, the money in Australian IT channel businesses was in hardware margin and project revenue; recurring service was the thing you added afterwards to keep the account.
blueAPACHE was built the other way round — as a managed services organisation from the start. The first managed services client arrived in 2001, and today managed services represents around 75% of revenue and shapes how services are designed and how accountability is structured.
Milestones
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1997–98 | Founded in Melbourne by Chris Marshall |
| 2001 | First managed services client |
| 2003 | emPOWER brand created |
| 2010 | emPOWER Network and Cloud launched; Brisbane office opened |
| 2017 | United States launch |
| 2022 | Experience business unit established |
| 2026 | Current positioning: One operating model. Three ways to engage. One outcome |
2010: building the platform rather than reselling one
The most consequential decision after the founding one.
In 2010, when most mid-market providers were reselling infrastructure, blueAPACHE built its own cloud platform. That remains the structural differentiator — blueAPACHE owns and controls the technology and communications services it delivers, rather than assembling them from other people's platforms.
The practical consequence is accountability. A provider reselling someone else's infrastructure can explain an outage; it cannot fix the underlying cause. Owning the stack means the party you hold accountable is the party that can act.
2022: the Experience business unit
Established to focus on the employee and customer experience side of the operating model — a recognition that in managed services, the quality of the interaction is the product as much as the infrastructure underneath it.
Where the story sits today
- 300+ customers
- 165+ data centres interconnected globally
- Offices in Melbourne (HQ), Sydney and Brisbane, with presence in the United States, London and Singapore
- Privately owned, Australian owned and operated
- Approximately 200 staff
The stated mission is to be the global mid-market service provider of choice.
The four values
We Care · Trust · Accountability · Technical Excellence
These underpin the We Care programme, blueAPACHE's environmental, social and governance commitment.
Why the history is relevant to a buyer
Two reasons, both practical rather than sentimental:
Longevity is a risk signal. An organisation entering a 36-month minimum term is underwriting its provider's continued existence for that period. Nearly three decades of continuous operation under consistent ownership is evidence, not marketing.
The managed-services-first origin explains the operating model. Providers that added managed services to a product business tend to carry the product incentives underneath. A business built around recurring service from the start is structured differently — and that difference shows up in how accountability is allocated when something goes wrong.
Founding is expressed as 1997–98 pending confirmation of the exact year. Executive titles other than the Founder and Managing Director are not published here pending confirmation of current roles.