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Webcentral, formerly known as Melbourne IT Group, is an Australian digital services provider. It is a publicly-traded company that was listed on the
Australian Securities Exchange Australian Securities Exchange Ltd or ASX, is an Australian public company that operates Australia's primary securities exchange, the Australian Securities Exchange (sometimes referred to outside of Australia as, or confused within Australia as ...
() in December 1999. It provides internet domain registration, email and office applications, cloud hosting, cloud services, 5G networks, managed services, IT services, DevOps security, and digital marketing. Founded in 1996, it was the first Australian
domain name registrar A domain name registrar is a company that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. A domain name registrar must be accredited by a generic top-level domain (gTLD) registry or a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry. A regist ...
.


History


Beginnings

Web Central Group's history dates back to April 1996 when Eugene Falk AM OBE and Professor Peter Gerrand were appointed as Chairman and CEO, respectively, for the
University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in Victoria. Its main campus is located in Parkville, an inner suburb no ...
's new commercial subsidiary Melbourne Information Technology International Pty Ltd, which commenced operations from 1 May 1996. Professor Iain Morrison was appointed the third foundation director of the company. The company chose to trade under the business name of Melbourne IT from its earliest days. Contrary to popular belief, the company was not set up to trade in domain names. The company's charter was to demonstrate the University's strategic leadership in working with industry and government in selected areas of IT. Its first and continuingly profitable business, up until its float on the ASX in December 1999, was its joint venture ASAC (Advanced Services Applications Centre) with Ericsson Australia. ASAC was set up to develop applications with synergies between the Internet and advanced telecommunications, particularly mobile products. ASAC was recognized by Ericsson as one of its Global Design Centres in 1997 and contributed $0.5 million in profit to Melbourne IT in the year before its float. ASAC was incorporated as an independent joint venture in December 2000, but became a casualty of Ericsson's downsizing of its global R&D following the bursting of the
Dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...
in July 2000. On 21 June 1996 a front-page article in ''
The Australian Financial Review ''The Australian Financial Review'' (abbreviated to the ''AFR'') is an Australian business-focused, compact daily newspaper covering the current business and economic affairs of Australia and the world. The newspaper is based in Sydney, New Sou ...
'' by Charles Wright drew attention to the parlous state of commercial domain name registration in Australia, where a large backlog of Australian businesses was waiting for the processing of their applications for com.au domain names by the part-time domain name administrator, Robert Elz, senior system administrator in the University of Melbourne's Computer Science Department, who declined to communicate with the media. Robert Elz had been assigned the role of administrator of the
.au .au is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Australia. It was created on 5 March 1986. Domain name policy is managed by .au Domain Administration (auDA). As of July 2018, the registry is operated by Afilias. History The d ...
top-level domain by
Jon Postel Jonathan Bruce Postel (; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for bein ...
since 1986, an arrangement that worked quite satisfactorily through the early 1990s when the Internet was large of interest only to tertiary education and research institutions. The AFR article caused Melbourne University to be aware of the possible commercial value of the rights to assign domain names, but also of the damage to the University's reputation if the registration of com.au domain names was not transferred to a competent commercial organization. The Head of the Computer Science Department persuaded Mr. Elz to transfer the administration of com.au names to the University's subsidiary Melbourne IT, which he did by way of a non-exclusive license, to be reviewed after five years. Melbourne IT was awarded a grant of $100,000 by the
Government of Victoria The Victoria State Government, also referred to as just the Victorian Government, is the state-level authority for Victoria, Australia. Like all state governments, it is formed by three independent branches: the executive, the judicial, and th ...
in 1996 in return for registering the backlog of over 2,000 com.au applications free to the applicants, and used this money to build its first domain name registration software platform. From October 1996 Melbourne IT began pricing its services by charging for new and renewed com.au names at 10% below the market rate set by
Network Solutions Network Solutions, LLC is an American-based technology company and a subsidiary of Web.com, the 4th largest .com domain name registrar with over 6.7 million registrations as of August 2018. In addition to being a domain name registrar, Network ...
for the popular .com names and was the first domain name registrar worldwide to introduce trademark checking and money-back service assurance guarantees. It also introduced three-tiered pricing for different levels of turnaround time, during the first two years 1997-98 before eligibility decisions were sped up by online access to the Australian trademarks database and to registries of Australian business names and gazetted geographical names. Melbourne IT also moved to align to Robert Elz's rather idiosyncratic eligibility criteria (e.g., ‘no name should in principle be registered if found in an English dictionary; but exceptions had been made to this before 1996 such as news.com.au and travel.com.au, which annoyed other applicants to the rules for registering business names in Australia). In April 1999, Melbourne IT was selected by ICANN to be one of the first five registrars to register .com, .net and .org names in competition with the incumbent Network Solutions. Entry into the international domain name market from July 1999 greatly increased the company's revenues and market value, and caused the University to prepare the company for an
initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
. On 14 December 1999, Melbourne IT was floated on the ASX, near the height of the
dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...
. It benefited from a cover story by finance journalist Ivor Rees in a weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review in November 1999, describing it presciently as the ‘Hottest Float of the Year. Interest in the shares was particularly strong because it was the only Australian tech stock floating that year with a track record of actual profitability. Demands for a prospectus were so high that complaints were aired in the media by members of the public unable to obtain one. The chief beneficiaries of the float were the clients of the underwriters, JB Were and
CommSec CommSec is Australia's largest online stockbroking firm. It is a subsidiary of the Commonwealth Bank. Though its Internet trading platform constitutes the vast majority of its business, it also offers a telephone based brokerage service, and i ...
, some of whom made massive stag profits when the stock peaked at $8.20 on the day of its float, compared with the IPO price of $2.20. In 2000 the Victorian Auditor-General held an investigation into whether the stock was undervalued by the underwriters when listed, but concluded that the float had been carried out properly.


2000s

The University of Melbourne received a gross benefit of $93.5 million through selling 85% of its equity in the float, as well as a pre-float dividend of $1 million, but left the company with $7.5 million as
working capital Working capital (WC) is a financial metric which represents operating liquidity available to a business, organisation, or other entity, including governmental entities. Along with fixed assets such as plant and equipment, working capital is consi ...
. The stock held up above $8 for four months following the
dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...
of April 2000, peaking briefly at $17 in February, but sank to $5.99 after the company released a realistic market outlook on 23 August 2000. During January to August 2000 the founding CEO Peter Gerrand founded subsidiaries in the US and Europe, and participated in the creation of
auDA .au Domain Administration (auDA) is the policy authority and industry self-regulatory body for the .au domain, which is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Australia. It was formed in 1999 to manage the .au ccTLD with the endorsement ...
as the national domain name industry self-regulator. On 14 September he announced he would leave the company on 30 September for family reasons; after this announcement the stock sank by a further 10%. He was succeeded by his deputy Adrian Kloeden, and continued as a consultant to the company until after the hosting of ICANN's meeting in Melbourne in March 2001. Adrian Kloeden was succeeded as CEO by Theo Hnarakis in November 2002. In September 2006, Melbourne IT acquired the Australian Internet hosting company, WebCentral Group (ASX:WCG) via a
scheme of arrangement A scheme of arrangement (or a "scheme of reconstruction") is a court-approved agreement between a company and its shareholders or creditors (e.g. lenders or debenture holders). It may affect mergers and amalgamations and may alter shareholder or ...
and delisted the WebCentral group from the ASX. Founded in 1997, WCG has 2
data centre A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommuni ...
s in Brisbane, one at Wickham Street,
Fortitude Valley Fortitude Valley (often called "The Valley" by local residents) is an inner suburb of the City of Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland, Australia. In the , Fortitude Valley had a population of 9,708 people. The suburb features two pedestr ...
, and another in Spring Hill at a
PIPE Networks PIPE Networks (also known as PIPE) is an Australian telecommunications company, based in Brisbane, Queensland. It is a subsidiary of TPG Telecom. Its primary business is setting up peering exchanges. PIPE itself stands for "Public Internet Pe ...
facility. Staff from Webcentral's Brisbane office also manage a large colocation area in an
Equinix Equinix, Inc. is an American multinational company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that specializes in Internet connection and data centers. The company is a leader in global colocation data center market share, with 240 data centers ...
datacenter in
Mascot, New South Wales Mascot is a suburb in the Inner-South of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Mascot is located 7 kilometres south of the Sydney central business district and is one of the administrative centres of the Bayside Council. A small p ...
. Dr Bruce Tonkin, who joined Melbourne IT in 1999 as Chief Technology Officer, was elected convenor of ICANN's GNSO (Generic Names Support Organization) constituency from June 2004 to June 2007, and will serve on the ICANN Boards as the GNSO's elected representative from May 2008. On 30 April 2008 Melbourne IT announced it was going to purchase
VeriSign Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, United States that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the , , and gener ...
's Digital Brand Management Services for US$50m.


2010s

On 23 December 2011, Melbourne IT accidentally leaked the details of more than 28000 customers On 30 July 2012, Melbourne IT servers were hacked by the internet group Anonymous. MelbourneIT was also a new gTLD consultancy, and the week of January 2012, which was the launch of ICANN's new gTLD application period, it announced that it had been working with over 100 applications on behalf of various clients. MelbourneIT also noted that many of its clients are Fortune 500 companies or associated with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). The latter fact is particularly noteworthy given the fact that ANA had led a high-profile anti-gTLD expansion campaign following the approval of the program, and was successful in achieving multiple hearings in the U.S. Congress and other anti-TLD expansion forums and press. In February 2012, one of the first public Brand TLD ventures, StarHub, announced that it had partnered with MelbourneIT's Digital Brand Services to help apply for and manage its proposed.Starhub TLD. Later that month, MelbourneIT revealed that they were currently working on 120 new gTLD applications and that they expected to bring that number to 150 before the application window closed in just over a month. It was also announced that MelbourneIT was working as new gTLD consultants with the governments of the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales, and with ARI Registry Services, to prepare bids for .melbourne, .sydney, and .victoria. 3The company ended up handling 148 applications, approximately a quarter of which came from Australian clients. On 29 August 2013, Melbourne IT CEO Theo Hnarakis announced that the
Syrian Electronic Army The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA; ar, الجيش السوري الإلكتروني) is a group of computer hackers which first surfaced online in 2011 to support the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Using spamming, website defac ...
had attacked the
New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
Web site by tricking people managing the New York Times
DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...
domain as a reseller of Melbourne IT to disclose their login credentials in a targeted
phishing Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent (e.g., spoofed, fake, or otherwise deceptive) message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious softwar ...
attack. On 27 February 2014, Melbourne IT announced the acquisition of their rival NetRegistry Group for $50.4 million. On 17 December 2014, Websites and emails were knocked offline by a botched migration. At the time of writing both had been offline for over a month with outages continuing On 10 June 2015, Melbourne IT acquired 50.2% of Outware Mobile for $21.7 million Outware Mobile was founded in 2009 and quickly grew to one of the largest app development companies in Australia. Outwear designed and developed some of the most used apps in Australia, including AFL Live, NRL Live, and Cricket Live. On 25 February 2015, Melbourne IT revealed plans to buy Uber Global for $15.5 million. On 16 March 2016, Melbourne IT acquired InfoReady for $15 million from Tristan Sternson. On 17 February 2017, Melbourne IT acquired the remaining 24.9% of Outware Mobile for $26.9 million from Eytan Lenko, Gideon Kowadlo and Danny Gorog. All three founders exited the business and have started their own ventures, including the software business Snap Send Solve. In May 2017, Melbourne IT acquired WME Group for approximately AU$39 million( US$39 million). On 28 May 2018, Melbourne IT Group officially rebranded as Arq Group.


2020s

On 28 May 2020, Arq Group rebranded as Webcentral Group. In July 2021, it was announced that 5G Networks would become a subsidiary of Webcentral in October or November 2021, subject to approvals.


External links


LinkedIn

Bloomberg


References

{{reflist Domain name registrars Companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange Organisations based in Melbourne Web hosting Technology companies established in 1996 Internet technology companies of Australia