KEY POINTS:
Auckland software company Healthphone has lured a senior Microsoft executive and will move its headquarters to the Seattle home of its software partner as it gears up for expansion and a global push into phone-based health services.
Debbi Gillotti heads to Healthphone after six years at Microsoft, the past three in the public sector division, which she helped form and grew into a thriving global business.
Her resume is dotted with stints at Fortune 500 companies but Gillotti said her experience in fast-growing, global businesses would serve her well at Healthphone.
During her time as chief information officer at Starbucks, the coffee chain grew from 900 to more than 3000 stores and went international.
She discovered Healthphone at a convention in Texas two years ago and thought the company's software was a perfect fit for Microsoft's software-as-a-service strategy for the public sector.
"I was impressed with the talent and maturity of their product vision and the software-as-a-service model is something we think is going to be huge in the public sector," she said.
The company's technology gives health providers access to patient information and other data over PCs, laptops or other mobile devices.
Its software has long been closely integrated into Microsoft programs such as Outlook Express, Excel and the Windows Mobile platform for smartphones and handheld computers. It uses Microsoft's Health Connection Engine to share information among health providers.
Healthphone's chief executive, Matt Hector-Taylor, who will remain with the company as president and chief strategy officer when Gillotti assumes the role in June, said the company had thrown its lot in with Microsoft because it liked the technology platform, Microsoft's global presence and its health software strategy.
"We're already global, but Debbi's appointment is about us going to that next level. It moves the locus of control away from New Zealand and closer to our core markets, 95 per cent of which are above the equator," he said.
Healthphone has 45 staff, most of them based in New Zealand, but Hector-Taylor said a lack of skilled software developers here was becoming a major problem.
"It's an issue for us maintaining our development in New Zealand," he said. "There are 850 vacancies for business analysts in Auckland, we need five world-class business analysts yesterday."
Healthphone has been in expansion mode opening offices in Australia, Canada, Singapore and the United States in the last year. It plans to be in Britain and Hong Kong by June.
Hector-Taylor said New Zealand health providers were progressive in adopting systems for managing long-term patient care. But services aimed directly at the consumer allowing them to receive information and reminders via mobile phone and the internet had been slower to take off.
Gillotti's aspirations for the fast-growing health software start-up are of suitably Microsoft proportions.
"What I'd like to see is Healthphone get big enough that we need to have a direct flight from Auckland to Seattle."
