Xena's other success story spreads NZ farm technology

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

Xena the Warrior Princess has done more than kickstart the Kiwi film industry.

Out in the paddocks of Waikato, she has inspired a farming software company with global ambitions.

Xenacom - the name came up when co-founders Heather McEwen and Tina Reddington were "sitting having a glass of wine" - was born amidst the stud farms of McEwen's home town of Cambridge.

Last December she moved the business to the new Waikato Innovation Park at Ruakura, where it is at the centre of a group developing new technology to trace individual cows and sheep from their birth through the abattoirs and on to the world's supermarket shelves.

This month McEwen leaves to spend six months in San Francisco promoting the company's software to US seed merchants and beekeepers, and sweet-talking Californian venture capitalists into fuelling Xenacom's growth.

Last year it earned $4.5 million. McEwen's goal is $100 million within five years, and her mentor and fellow Kiwi IT export Linda Jenkinson tells her: "Aim for $400-500 million."

The company is one of a remarkable group of largely "ag-biotech" businesses in the innovation park that have created what the park's chief executive, Derek Fairweather, calls "a culture like the Ruakura of old - this collaboration culture".

Old rivals such as former Carter Holt Harvey Plastics boss Jack Jenkins and Brian Cornish, who quit his job as CHH Plastics marketing manager 10 years ago to start Advanced Animal Technology, are being drawn into joint projects such as food traceability, fermentation, and looking for valuable "biopharmaceuticals" in plants and animals.

Fairweather hopes to get most of the 17 businesses in the park, and others in the 70-strong Waikato Ag-Biotech Cluster, to take shares in a proposed company to develop food traceability techniques that will give New Zealand a head start before Europe and the US introduce tough traceability requirements in 2006.

"We want to offer the business benefits to the farming community to justify the costs that come with that kind of compliance," Fairweather says.

The innovation park is designed for interaction.

The initial 3600sq m, two-storeyed glass and steel building, just outside the cattlestop of the Ruakura

Research Centre, is designed around a long central atrium with a cafe at one end and plenty of space for informal chats and organised group sessions where each company struts its stuff to the others.

Cornish, whose company has developed a device to make a cow produce an egg ready for fertilisation within 10 days, welcomes the networking opportunities with other tenants and with visitors who come to the building to see one company and often end up seeing several.

"The whole place has a good synergy," he says.

His firm employs a Mandarin-speaking executive, Tina Wang, who has been able to help other companies in the park in their dealings with China.

Dr Garth Smith, a former HortResearch manager now running a business called BioVittoria, which plans to buy a naturally sweet extract from the luohan fruit in China and sell it in America, also shares an interest in Asia with Cornish's company, which plans to manufacture its devices in Taiwan.

Smith and NZ Biotechnologies, a company run by fellow scientist Dr Robert Welch, share an interest in the health value of natural products, although Welch is growing his plants in New Zealand and selling them mainly to Japan.

"We have talked about putting our companies together in a year or two, if we are successful," Welch says.

Bill Thompson, who chairs the DEC International NZ group, which has grown out of CHH Plastics, has moved into the innovation park office of a DEC subsidiary, Sensortec.

"Yesterday I got notice from a colleague here on this site of a potential company that we should look at acquiring," he said last week.

"It's all these links that you have over coffee."

When McEwen founded Xenacom in 1997 with her younger brother Gavin and Tina Reddington, the three of them were the company's only staff. Now they employ 38 people.

The firm's Xen-Agri program helps seed companies keep track of their seed around the world, and Xen-Apiary tracks bees, for beekeepers.

McEwen is a passionate believer that women can succeed in software.

Last year she led all the women in the company - half the staff - in "Xena's Angels" costumes for a presentation on IT to high school girls at Waikato University.

"I'm fairly committed to doing some more of that," she says, "because I don't think there are enough women in IT."

Xenacom

Innovation Waikato