Jade Software NZ ramps up Australian activities

New Zealand-based software and applications company, Jade Software, is looking to win more business in the Australian market.

Jade Software managing director, Craig Richardson, told Computerworld Australia that despite the company having a presence in Australia for the past 15 years, its growth had been "fairly static".

“It’s only recently that we started dialling up our presence here [in Australia] because our Joob [Cloud mobile] product and Methodware investigations is what is driving the movement into Australia," he said.

At present, the company has a total turnover of $NZ45 million ($AU36 million), with its Joob intelligence and mobile offerings accounting for 10 per cent of sales while the governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and investigations make up 25 per cent of sales.

Methodware is a GRC and investigations software product, which has been implemented by the Australian Federal Police to enable more than one officer to work on an investigation and separate pieces of information used to build a case.

"We have 3000 customers globally, with 55 per cent of those based in Australasia,” Richardson said.

“The growth line for mobile and investigations is in Australia and the Americas.”

According to Richardson, the company only invests in a particular market, such as policing, if it is a “billion dollar plus market”.

“We’re really targeting high growth markets, such as 20 per cent plus, where there is the opportunity to be disruptive," he said.

"We want to hit emerging categories because we are seeing a shift from what we would call ‘traditional systems of record’ such as the back office, which is very hard to be competitive in."

Richardson said the company was targeting “extensions” of the back office, such as mobile integration, because it could compete with international vendors and be innovative.

“We’re not trying to change out a core banking system because it’s pretty unlikely someone like the Auckland Savings Bank [a division of CBA] is going to trust 300 guys from New Zealand to change out their core banking system, but they have no issues with us doing mobile integration and extending all those services to mobile [in New Zealand],” Richardson said.

Jade is also looking at Cloud computing from a mobile perspective with its Joob offerings.

“About eight months ago, we found a lot of our large enterprise customers were going through the pain of how they went mobile because the mobile penetration with smartphones is going crazy at the moment,” Richardson said.

“They were having trouble extending their traditional enterprise systems, whether they be financial, operational and their back office to the mobile.”

He said the problems were three fold: Multiple operating systems on mobile which were changing very rapidly, the issue of maintaining mobile security, and multiple systems that customers had to aggregate to get one service.

“We thought we could solve that problem with … Joob mobile,” Richardson said.

“That means we allow you to connect any system or social network to any mobile device.

“We can aggregate those networks into one data set and push them out to one device.”

In the mobile space, Richardson was confident that at least half of Jade’s sales would come from Australia, with the other half coming from New Zealand and the US.

"If you look over the next 12 to 18 months, there should be at least $2 million worth of sales coming out of Australia,” he said.

“A lot of that will depend on building partnerships with system integrators and we are in discussions with some already.”

However, he could not reveal who the system integrators were.

In the United States, the company is working with defence contractor Halliburton, with defence potentially being the next target area for Jade in Australia.

“Because we are doing governance, risk and compliance and policing in some places that means there is a logical extension into defence and public safety," Richardson said.

“We are building out our presence there and focus with our investigator product to extend that into operational policing.”

The company also works with mining company Rio Tinto to provide Master Series logistics software to its port operations in Western Australia.

Jade Software currently has offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, with 10 staff based in Sydney, 18 in Melbourne and 15 in Adelaide.

Richardson said there are plans to hire more staff in Australia, based on demand for its Methodware and Joob offerings.

"The expansion will be in sales and technical support [staff], but we will continue to do [product] development in Christchurch purely because it is close to our research partners at Canterbury University in Christchurch and Waikato University in Hamilton,” he said.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

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