Axon nets $600,000 for software packaging

By ADAM GIFFORD

IT services company Axon Computertime has received $600,000 from Technology New Zealand to shrink-wrap software for export markets.

Axon chief executive Matt Kenealy says his company will match the investment, as is required under the terms of the scheme.

The first product to be packaged will be Advanced Management Environment (AME) - the software Axon uses to run corporate computer networks for customers such as ASB Bank, UnitedNetworks, Tower and PDL.

"Our larger customers typically have a diverse range of servers, personal computers and applications software," Mr Kenealy said.

"AME represents Axon's intellectual property developed over a number of years in helping those customers achieve lower costs of management and improved services from their IT infrastructure."

Other products Axon wants to package are SupplyNet, an electronic commerce and procurement application, and DesignNet, which automates the development and management of website content.

Axon is using SupplyNet and DesignNet to build an electronic procurement portal for Foodstuffs' subsidiary wholesale companies, Toops, Trents and Gilmours.

A separate company, PIP (Packaged Intellectual Property) Software, has been formed to handle sales and marketing of the new products, so potential partners and resellers are not put off by seeing AME as an Axon-specific product.

"We set out three years ago with the idea our business was not about providing services or hardware, but was about capturing intellectual property and turning it into something we can leverage," Mr Kenealy said.

Axon wants to sell AME through multinational service and hardware providers. Parts of the solution can be preloaded on hardware.

"We've looked at our potential reach and service capabilities, and we're not going to go out and develop our own global services organisation. So we spoke to the multinationals about this.

"When we show AME to people who understand the issues corporates have rolling out Windows 2000 and previously NT, they think it's fantastic," Mr Kenealy said.

"The first reaction when we get to United States companies is they say, 'We're sure we must have something like this somewhere, or we're sure we can develop it."

The answer to that is they don't have something, and it's not so easy to develop.

Mr Kenealy said that while products already existed which allowed companies to roll out an identical system image onto thousands of desktops - the main one being Symantec's New Zealand-developed Ghost technology - these do not match AME's ability to manage a system once it is set up.

In NZ, sales of the software licence part of AME installations have typically been from $30,000 to $200,000.

Mr Kenealy said part of the new project would be to ensure that AME could cope with global systems containing thousands of servers and tens of thousands of desktops, as well as develop an "AME light" version.

The minimum number of workstations AME would support economically is about 100.

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