INVESTMENT CRITERIA

CHOICE OF INDUSTRY

As a small but nimble and experienced development team, we are focused on niche markets.  The markets we choose are large enough to be commercially significant over the long term, yet not so large as to attract the attention of software development companies who can economically invest greater resources than ourselves.

For this reason, we avoid developing generic applications or software that has already been developed or largely perfected by other IT service providers.

Typically the industries we target have a combination of the following:

• The Application’s features are relevant mostly to a given geographic region and need substantial re-work to be relevant on a global basis.
• The industry is currently poorly serviced or not serviced by IT providers
• There is no clear market leading product or the current market leading product has not been substantially overhauled in the past 10 years
• The industry’s requirements are complex and varied between customers
• Any current applications used by the industry are not yet web enabled or are built around a thick client architecture.

While the above criteria would discourage most software vendors from targeting such an industry, we view these difficulties as future barriers to entry for competitors.

CHOICE OF TECHNOLOGY

As our name suggests, our skills are primarily in the development of software that runs on thin client technology.  Our expertise is in delivering software applications to a web browser that look, feel and behave like thick client software. 

Benefits of using web technologies to deliver our products include:

• Easy to deploy, fix and manage centrally
• Industry-wide Databases can be centralized to a single data centre, making future collaborative projects simpler to execute
• Gain leverage from adjacent industries by interchanging data and functionality using standards such as XML

The current flavor of development technologies we utilize include:

• COM & ASP.NET
• SQL Server 2005
• IIS and Windows Server 2003
• Windows Mobile 5

We do not necessarily use the latest technologies available at a given time.  Our choice of technology will be determined by:

• Relevance to the requirements of industry we are developing for
• A track record of scalability, ease of use and availability of external expertise

OWNERSHIP AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

An industry leading application is made up of two primary businesses:

• A development entity, focused on the creation of the core Intellectual Property
• A commercialization, sales, service and support entity, for distributing the product within a given market

Our preference is to retain ownership of the Intellectual Property throughout all phases of the application development and commercialization, though we occasionally consider equity investment from industry participants either above or below the supply chain.

We will often seek investment or joint venture opportunities for the running of the distribution entity, particularly in overseas environments.

To avoid perceived conflict of interest, we generally do not seek investment from direct participants in the industries we serve.

Development of an application to the stage where it is accepted as an industry leading product is a high risk and long term investment.  This element of risk and the long term commitment required is carefully considered prior to us engaging in a new project.