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If there’s one thing Mark Loveys has proven good at over the past four to five years, it’s been making his businesses grow.
Last time I called on him, about two-and-a-half years ago, his Enprise business was powering ahead from its base in Auckland’s Mt Wellington. Most of the company’s growth was coming from Exonet, with a sideline business selling SAP’s Business One product for small to medium businesses looking promising.
Now the company has moved to much larger premises in a newly developed business complex in Avondale, with a spectacular view of the harbour.
Exonet – the enterprise application Mr Loveys originally developed with Borland Delphi to run high-flying local PC assembler PC Direct – probably still has a place in his heart, although less so since it was acquired by MYOB. And the company is also still going great guns not only as a reseller of Business One but, increasingly, as a developer of specialised SAP modules sold around the world through SAP’s huge marketing channels.
“We’ve become a lot more structured since we last talked,” Mr Loveys says. “Back then we were Enprise … a company that was doing lots of different things. Now we’ve set ourselves up as three business units.”
“Last time we were just starting to develop our job-costing product for SAP Business One. Now we’ve gone a long way down that track and we have a whole business unit, Enprise Global, devoted to very proactively marketing that product.”
“We have 97 reseller partners and 150 customers for the product in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and here. We’ve been helping them design a new strategy for selling Business One through targeted micro-verticals with sales, marketing and implementation materials tuned to those markets.”
“And I’m on their ISV [independent software vendor] advisory council too, which gives us the highest exposure to their most senior people and the opportunity to pass on the lessons we’ve learned in New Zealand and compare notes with others from around the world.”
“But the part of our business that is particularly exciting is EMS-Cortex.”
Exciting? EMS-Cortex could easily be Mr Loveys’ biggest hit yet – even bigger than Destiny in Motion from his time in the mid 1980s as singer, songwriter and bass player for Satellite Spies.
EMS-Cortex makes Cortex software for managing software as a service. According to the brochure, Cortex is “an advanced service provisioning product designed to meet the expanding demand for hosted services and business applications.”
Currently Cortex works mostly with Microsoft products, particularly Exchange, SharePoint and Live Communication Server, but also with Citrix, BlackBerry Enterprise Server and Exonet (of course). It can also be developed with the help of EMS-Cortex specialists and a Cortex software development kit to cope with special cases.
“It’s a business we acquired while we were looking for funding to take our job-costing module to the world,” Mr Loveys says. “We were talking to TMT Ventures and they introduced us to EMS-Ventures because they thought there were a lot of synergies between what we were doing and what they had.
“And we agreed – we’ve always been very pro-active in hosted services and we saw an opportunity to add accounting software to the mix of products that Cortex takes to the hosted service provider.”
“The product itself originally came out of work done for Telecom and is still used for much of Telecom’s hosted services. But it’s been significantly enhanced since then and we’re now supplying it to some of the largest service hosting firms in the world. Most of our customers are in the US, but we also have customers in Scandinavia, India, Australia, and the UK, Asia – everywhere.”
“What we’ve been noticing in the past six months is that there’s a really big boom happening in software as a service [where customers use software over the internet and pay a rental fee] and our sales have been ramping up accordingly.”
“We’ve signed up some very significant customers, and I’m pretty excited about the whole concept of software as a service.”
“A lot of partner companies such as IBM and HP seem to be positioning their future strategies around software as a service – desktop computing seems to be moving somewhat backstage while service is getting the drive going forward.”
I strongly suspect he’s right – the internet has made it so easy to locate data off-premises and to rely on access to data and constantly refreshed information managed by big servers, making running software off-site as well no big step anymore.
Most of us don’t need leased lines or other specialised links to run our software – for most purposes that’s a trivial task long solved, and I believe shared services will become increasingly commonplace at all levels, from the personal on up – providing the software to manage looks like an obvious recipe for success.
“Software as a service has the simplicity factor supporting it and I’m convinced it will eventually dominate the market – it just makes so many management issues disappear.” Mr Loveys says.
“What can be easier than connecting via a browser and bypassing all the corporate IT structures and management issues?”
Stephen Ballantyne - The National Business Review
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