Our story...
Back in 2003, Ross Willats set out to give small and medium businesses the same calibre of IT support as the big end of town - the kind you’d normally only get with an internal IT department. He’d started his career as a Novell engineer, then moved with the times into Microsoft technologies as New Zealand’s tech landscape shifted. A stint in London managing an IT team and working on large-scale Microsoft migrations for a multinational telco showed him what good technology support could really look like. He brought that experience home and founded Softlink, with one goal: give Kiwi businesses without their own IT team access to that same level of support, so they could get more out of their technology, not just keep the lights on.
From day one, that meant being more than a break-fix shop. Ross built Softlink around trust, honest advice, and doing right by clients — and as the business grew, so did that philosophy. Softlink became a Managed Services Provider, shifting the whole approach from reacting to problems to catching them before they happened. In other words, we stopped waiting for the phone to ring and started acting like the IT department our clients didn’t have in-house.
By the 2010s, Ross found himself spending more time in a strategic role — sitting down with clients to talk about where their business was headed and how technology could get them there, rather than just fixing what was in front of him.
Then in 2019, David Reid came on board as Technical Manager. He brought a wealth of experience in Microsoft technologies, IT leadership, and large-scale network and wireless projects across Asia, and — just as importantly — the same belief that clients come first. That shared outlook led to David becoming a shareholder in 2023.
Around the same time, the world was changing fast. Cyber threats were growing, and so were the demands on business technology. So Softlink leaned further into security — building a managed services model with cybersecurity at its core, alongside proactive support, automation, and ongoing advisory. The thinking has always been pretty simple: when your technology is secure, reliable, and properly looked after, you can stop worrying about it and get on with running your business.
More than two decades later, that’s still what we’re here to do. We’re the IT department for businesses across New Zealand — keeping them secure, helping them adopt new technology with confidence, and standing beside them as things keep changing. Because whatever comes next in tech, our job stays the same: trusted advice, solid support, and being the team our clients can count on.