In 1985 Russel Hill and Warwick Moore started Clarenston Pty. Ltd. and began trading as Preferred Computer Peripherals (PCP). They began trading in terminals, printers, and providing support for the mainframe and UNIX industry which at the time was primarily government and large corporations.

In 1991 PCP moved to the newly completed Pymble Corporate Centre with Informix.

In the mid-90s the affordability of personal computers began to increase and PCs were beginning to replace terminals, PCP acknowledged the change and adapted by establishing a partnership with the leader of one of Australia’s largest PC manufactures, Cornel Ung, founder of Optima Computers. With the affordability of personal computers on the rise, the necessity for email was soon to follow. Older email systems such as Fidonet were becoming too limited to endure the level of email communication that people required. PCP acknowledged the need for better email communication and approached the few internet providers available in Australia at the time to create a mail system for their customers, however none of them seemed to be able to meet the requirements for the end product that we wanted to provide to our customers.

It was decided that if we were to provide our customers with the email services they needed we would need to provide it ourselves. In 1995 Brad Dixon was brought on board to establish Preferred Internet Provider (PIP), we created our own email services and established a digital global link with the help of MCI, and our first datacentre was born. Due to the increasing popularity of the Internet, our datacentre was doubling in size every two years. Our hardware and services division had moved into the medium sized business sector due to the increasing affordability of PCs and the growing need for computer networks and data storage.

In 2000 Clarenston decided to utilise new technology developed by Microsoft and Novel to create a more sophisticated and centralised computing model. This new technology gave us the ability to introduce a system where all data and applications could be accessed on a centralised server using terminals or PCs (today this computing model is more commonly referred to as “Cloud Computing”), eliminating the need for a corporation to have in-house computer systems. This computing model required fast data links to the server, and at the time such links were expensive and only large scale businesses could utilise this system.

By 2008 ADSL2 was becoming widely available. PIP was eager to roll out its ADSL2 network in partnership with Telstra so that we could provide sufficient bandwidth for small to medium businesses to work in the cloud. In 2010 Clarenston opened a new datacentre in partnerships with VMWare and Datacore to provide better cloud services. In 2011 Clarenston expanded their datacentre to multiple points across Sydney for reliability and redundancy, and did so again in 2012 with the addition of upgraded hardware to keep up with the demand of our cloud customers.

By 2014 Clarenston offered an array of products and had multiple divisions, it become the all-in-one solution for Australia’s I.T requirements. It was decided to combine and rebrand the company to its most well-known identity, PIP.