KEY POINTS:
The views around Hamilton are often obscured by fog in winter, but from Craig Cockerton's office you can see all the way to Oslo, Norway, by just picking up the phone. The open-plan office on the Waikato Innovation Park campus is an R&D hub for Tandberg, a Norwegian visual communications technology company, and all staff are equipped with the latest in videophone technology.
Tandberg zeroed in on Cockerton's fledgling technology company Ectus two years ago. The start-up's clever video streaming and archiving technology complemented the Norwegian giant's own product offerings and it snapped up Ectus (now Tandberg New Zealand) for US$9 million (now $11.6 million).
Then based in the university's commercial arm WaikatoLink, Ectus hadn't made a sale and was struggling to get its technology to an international market.
It had been getting by on revenue from its three-year contract to supply the university with its software services and might not have survived on its own, says WaikatoLink commercial manager Mark Stuart.
"There probably wouldn't be any Ectus now if Tandberg hadn't bought it or it certainly wouldn't be thriving. Now they've been slotted straight into a distribution network, they're exposed to international enterprise and prospects."
Cockerton never feared the multinational would take off with Ectus's intellectual property. The Norwegians made it clear from the start that they wanted the developers to stay on and work on the technology.
"That was key in our decision [to sell] because we knew they weren't looking to take our technology and our code base back to Norway and build it there.
"That was really important for staff as well [because] everybody wanted to know that there'd still be a job after the sale."
It's a happy ship: Tandberg has allowed Ectus free rein and not a lot has changed, says Cockerton.
The Norwegians are similar to Kiwis in attitude and sense of humour, and to smooth relations and cross-cultural understanding, technicians spend up to six months in the other country on work exchanges.
Of the seven Ectus founders, three remain: Cockerton, Ross Dewstow and David Hunt. None of the others left on bad terms, says former chief executive and co-founder Mark Topping.
Topping, who headed the university's IT and e-learning departments and is now a private investor in several technology start-ups, says the advantage of being based in the university was having a ready-made team and facilities but the downside was the time it took to convince the university to share what it owned.
Cockerton developed the core technology while researching for a masters degree. Students wanted lectures to be recorded so they could watch them in their own time but standard methods took a lot of time and manpower. The technology was further developed within the IT department at the University of Waikato and - with funding from venture capital company Endeavour i-cap and the university - evolved into Ectus in 2003.
For the seven staff who developed the original intellectual property, inviting Endeavour to come aboard was a no-brainer; the company needed money to survive.
Endeavour invested $1.2 million for a third of the company; the other two-thirds were shared between the university through WaikatoLink and the seven founders.
Sales figures for Ectus' division are no longer available but Endeavour i-cap's executive director Neville Jordan reckons the market for video-conferencing technology has never been better. Since Tandberg bought the company, oil prices have gone up significantly and concern about carbon emissions is forcing people to think twice about travelling, he says.
According to United States-based Wainhouse Research, high definition video conferencing has had a dramatic effect on the market in the past year. In its the 2006 survey, 4 per cent of the respondents in a global survey indicated they had some HD products in deployment; this figure has grown to 23 per cent in the results released in October. Those who expect to deploy it within one year rose from 14 per cent to 23 per cent.
Cockerton "can't say" what his company is working on now but whatever it is, he says Tandberg is "looking at pushing the boundaries of the technology".
* Tandberg New Zealand (formerly Ectus)
* Streaming and archiving of high-quality video
