Esolutions puts 'real grunt' into client support

By ADAM GIFFORD

Esolutions has laid off several marketing people and replaced them with channel support staff as it changes focus heading into its second year of operations.

General manager Jane Freeman said staff took voluntary redundancy.

"The head count remains the same," she said. "As we go into year two we're expecting big sales, so we're putting the emphasis on the channels so they can understand and support our products to the customers. We're putting in real grunt there - people with experience in dealing with big bids."

Ms Freeman said esolutions believed the initial premise of the application service provider (ASP) model - renting applications over the internet - would not work, so it had developed as an application infrastructure provider.

"Looking at the United States, the web services market is where the big players are, and that's where the strength of Telecom, EDS and Microsoft [esolutions' parents] lies."

Esolutions will offer to host companies' existing applications and then provide other applications or security features on top.

Products to be rolled out over the next few weeks include ibilling, an online bill payment service which will compete with NZ Post's eBill, and InfoXchange, a messaging middleware built around Microsoft's Biztalk technology.

Ms Freeman said ebit (earnings before interest and tax) was ahead of expectations and the company was on track to break even next year.

She said most interest was coming from medium and large corporates.