KEY POINTS:
Small Hamilton-based IT company NetValue expects a huge boost in international sales as a result of Microsoft taking an interest in its specialist high-performance search technology.
After seeing NetValue's ground-breaking technology for super-fast genetic searching and analysis, Microsoft has given the Waikato company access to its global marketing and sales network.
Microsoft announced on Tuesday it was conferring a rare "high-potential managed independent software vendor partner" status on NetValue, making it one of only about 400 companies worldwide Microsoft takes a special interest in grooming for success.
NetValue is the only New Zealand software company to make it into the high-potential group.
The announcement was made at Microsoft's High Performance on Wall Street Conference in New York, where Microsoft showcased a new specialist server operating system, Windows HPC Server 2008.
NetValue has also been named a Microsoft high-performance computing partner and the conference included a demonstration of NetValue's Slim Search genomic searching technology which allows gene research and analysis to be done at ultra-fast speeds without the need for supercomputers.
NetValue chief executive Graham Gaylard, who was in New York for the announcement, said the company sent details of its high-performance search technology to Microsoft last year, but thought little more about it until "we got the big call out of the blue" in May.
"They said: 'We really like your software and it fits in with a couple of directions we're going in as a company.' So we shot up to Redmond [Microsoft's Washington base] and talked to them and they told us they'd put us in this [high-potential] group."
Gaylard said the top-tier status would give NetValue unparalleled access to Microsoft's global sales and marketing network, which he expected would provide a huge boost to the business.
"We give them a competitive advantage and they give us an instant credibility. It's definitely a win-win."
NetValue, which was established in 2004 and has a staff of 40, is gearing up for business expansion as global interest in its technology grows. Gaylard spent last week in California talking to IT venture capitalists and said he expected interest from potential investors to be even stronger in the wake of the Microsoft partnership announcement.
While the company plans to open a US office, to be closer to major markets and funding sources, he says it will remain headquartered in Hamilton.
"Once we complete the funding rounds we're going through at the moment, the research and development will be ramped up in New Zealand," Gaylard said.
Interest in genomic searching and the comparative analysis of different genomes continues to grow. The technology is a powerful medical and research tool for scientists.
"It's all heading towards personalised medicine where everyone's going to get their genomes sequenced," Gaylard said.
Given the massive amounts of data involved in genomic analysis, the development of technology to enable fast searching on a cluster of standard computers, rather than using expensive supercomputers, is seen as a significant breakthrough.
"With all that information you need high-speed search technologies," Gaylard said. "We certainly have that. In fact we don't talk about time on the cluster any more; we just say our searches are real-time."
The algorithms behind NetValue's Slim Search were originally developed by listed New Zealand technology company Genesis Research and Development in 2004. Slim is an acronym for Sequence Location Indexer and Matcher.
When Genesis disbanded its bioinformatics team, the intellectual property was sold to a new company, Cartesian Gridspeed. NetValue purchased Cartesian Gridspeed this year.
Genesis said this week it retained an "economic interest" in Slim Search which included royalties on licensing revenue from the software.
www.netvalue.net.nz
