The company was seized by the FBI and the IRS in late 2004 under allegations of fraud by some of the executive team. Not long afterwards, the global company collapsed and went into receivership and the CEO committed suicide. Receivers closed the operation in Australia (which already had a handful of clients) within two weeks.

"We found ourselves a week before Christmas without a company, without a job, without an office, without furniture or anything, so my two business partners and I decided to go out and talk to our customers and see if we could resuscitate our company," Danieletto said.

After about six weeks spent renegotiating leases and investing savings into a re-iteration of the previous company, Applaud IT was operational from mid January 2005. The company has grown from 15 employees to 32 today.

"We had to localize support; we had to have our own 24x7 support system here rather than using the follow-the-sun approach of Cybernet. We had to establish the helpdesk infrastructure and hire additional team members, but since then we've gone from strength to strength," he said.