Agnosticism is a virtue when advising businesses about decisions worth millions of dollars, he says.
Hollister and managing director Phil Pietersen founded the company with a handful of employees after spotting a gap in the domestic market.
"New Zealand, as an economy, is not particularly well-serviced in some areas and it can be quite transactional - you've got these big vendors, brands like HP and Oracle, who have big solutions [to corporate software needs]," Hollister says. "It's not that [the solutions are] too expensive, but to get the best value out of them, you require talent around those systems.
"Those big vendors, because we're a small market, don't send their best people here to do the implementation," he argues. "Even relatively large companies, on a New Zealand scale, have issues around IT."
Clearpoint's brief is to help companies plan and build IT systems that suit their requirements and ambition - what Hollister describes as a mixture of strategy and architectural design.
Pietersen puts it like this: "At the heart of it is our love of innovation and our ability to take ideas and turn them into real business outcomes - ideas are cheap; making ideas into something real is an art."
A good example of the company's "art" is San Francisco-based start-up Anaplan, a company that helps businesses analyse data and make forecasts.
In 2009 it flew its chief architect to Auckland to meet Pietersen and Hollister on the recommendation of a colleague.
The Clearpoint team created a service-delivery platform which allows Anaplan's clients to interact with its core technology, a multi-channel cloud-computing system for storing and sharing data. "[Clearpoint] were responsible for developing a lot of the client-facing tools," says Anaplan chief executive Guy Haddleton, an expat Kiwi.
"The team had a depth of skills, experience and a working style that was just brilliant [and] they delivered the project on time, within budget and bug-free."
Anaplan has been a "cornerstone" client for more than two years and has not only retained Clearpoint's services, but has engaged it to work on another project for a British subsidiary.
"That's opened up a lot of conversations from other companies, in particular California," says Pietersen, and he believes "some well-known names in the US" could soon be calling on the company's expertise.
Hollister says: "There seems to be a growing need in that part of the [US] for small, innovative teams and New Zealanders are really good at this stuff."
New Zealand could become a high-tech industrial suburb of San Francisco or London because of internet connectivity, he argues: "If you want small, smart, hyper-productive and innovative teams, then New Zealand is the place."
What particularly excites Hollister and Pietersen is the software revolution that marries the concept of aesthetic beauty to absolute functionality.
Just as design school Bauhaus stormed the barriers separating fine and applied arts to create products and buildings that are functional yet still worthy of display in a gallery, software design is increasingly bringing the disciplines of graphic design and architecture to the field.
"It's an area where gaming programmers have lived for a long time," Hollister notes. "Things have to look great and work well and be high-performance, and now that trend is emerging into mainstream software.
"People don't have tolerance for ugly, hard-to-use software and enterprises are absolutely chocka with these legacy large software platforms, which are difficult to use. It's great for a business like us, because we truly believe in great usability and interactive design."
