Infotech Weekly, Issue 527, by Tom Pullar-Strecker
Wellington business software specialist Sysware Consulting Group has opened an office in Sydney with six staff, which it has
acquired by buying out the Australian arm of British software and consulting group SPSInfoquest.
New Zealand software firms have had mixed experiences breaking into the Australian market, but Sysware expects to
at least double its revenues in the year to the end of March - thanks largely to expansion across the Tasman - with
New Zealand revenues growing about 30 percent.
The company, which specialises in helping large organisations such as banks and government departments extract strategic
information from data held on computer systems, opened an office in Melbourne a year ago, which employs four. The company has 27 staff, up from
18 a year ago.
Revenues amount to "several million dollars", and the company is profitable.
Director Ian Munro, one of four shareholder-directors, attributes
the group's success across the Tasman to a prudent entry strategy. Rather than launch in Australia with a fanfare, the
group moved into Melbourne on the back of a relationship with a large Trans-Tasman customer in the financial services sector, which it then
used as a reference site and base for networking, with marketing driven from New Zealand.
"In hindsight, it is clear to us there is a right and a wrong way to approach the Australian marketplace. If you work
through contacts and sponsors, you may not start off big, but you can build up good business."
SPSInfoquest Australia, which had previously worked with Sysware, came up for sale when its British parent switched tack to concentrate on
the Strategic Consulting market, says Mr Munro. "The Sydney subsidiary was "a small outpost", concerned more with day-to-day consulting,
and the British parent agreed to the Sysware acquisition in part because Sysware "took the welfare of its staff seriously, and wanted to take
them on", he says.
At the same time as expanding geographically, Sysware has broadened its commercial focus in the past year. The company
used to specialise in putting together data warehouses, but is now positioning itself in the broader "business intelligence" market,
says fellow director and shareholder, Charles Chinnaiyah. The company has strong skills in the business software system SAS,
but is "vendor-independent". The product emphasis is becoming less and less of an issue, says Mr Munro. "The issue is,
'can you get this information out of an operational system and make sense of it for senior management.'"
Customers include most of the big New Zealand banks, some government departments, and insurers. Mr Munro says the ability of Australian Corporates
to extract Management Information from their computer systems to support decision making at a senior level runs the gamut from "very good"
to "very poor". Decisions follow that approach.
As yet, he has no evidence that the recent corporate collapse of Enron in the United States or - closer to home - Ansett in Australia has
sharpened companies' focus on business intelligence. It would be nice if it did.
A year ago, Sysware considered seeking new equity partners, as it considered a step change in growth.
But Mr Munro says that while the four directors are open minded about the future, the focus is back on developing the business in a controlled
organic manner. We did some research in terms of getting new equity in, but we couldn't see an attractive way forward.
One of the key drivers for the directors was that we wanted to be in control of our destiny.
Sysware's other two shareholder-directors are Laurie Fleming and Don Stanley.
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