Its first and continuingly profitable business, up until its float on the Australian Securities Exchange in December 1999, was its joint venture ASAC (Advanced Services Applications Centre) with Ericsson Australia.

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 in July 2000.

[citation needed] Robert Elz had been assigned the role of administrator of the .au top-level domain by Jon Postel since 1986, an arrangement that worked quite satisfactorily through the early 1990s when the Internet was largely of interest only to tertiary education and research institutions.

The Head of the Computer Science Department persuaded 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.

[citation needed] 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.

[citation needed] 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.

The stock held up above $8 for four months following the dot-com bubble 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.

Founded in 1997, WCG has 2 data centres in Brisbane, one at Wickham Street, Fortitude Valley, and another in Spring Hill at a PIPE Networks facility.

Staff from Webcentral's Brisbane office also manage a large colocation area in an Equinix datacentre in Mascot, New South Wales.

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.

[14] On 29 August 2013, Melbourne IT CEO Theo Hnarakis announced[15] that the Syrian Electronic Army had attacked[16] the New York Times Web site by tricking people managing the New York Times DNS domain as a reseller of Melbourne IT to disclose their login credentials in a targeted phishing attack.

On 17 February 2017, Melbourne IT acquired the remaining 24.9% of Outware Mobile for $26.9 million[24] from Eytan Lenko, Gideon Kowadlo[25] and Danny Gorog.