Esolutions sets out new direction after ASP stalls

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Esolutions, the e-commerce company jointly owned by Telecom, EDS and Microsoft, says it's on course to turn a profit even though its original application service provider (ASP) model has stalled.

General manager Jane Freeman said the company's first full year financial results showed revenue of just over $10 million in the 12 months to June compared with a forecast of $9.6 million.

Esolutions is forecasting to break even by the end of this financial year.

Ms Freeman said the company had "taken the accelerator off" the software as a service model and had already moved towards outsourcing and web infrastructure.

"We recognised in June last year that the ASP model was not going to go anywhere fast in NZ," she said.

Ms Freeman said esolutions had built up a 1500-strong customer base, which was close to a 12 per cent market penetration of its target market of firms with 20 or more employees.

Services such as efax, which allowed customers to send out multiple faxes with a single email, had proven popular, as had the security and virtual private networking product Safecom, which had been adopted by 40 organisations.

However, esolutions' more advanced offerings such as B2B marketplaces appear not to have captured the imagination of local businesses yet.

Esolutions Channel manager Sue McCarty said the three "online communities" at Turners Car Auctions, Biolabs Netmarket and New Zealand Health were "the main ones."

Ms Freeman said esolutions had completed restructuring while maintaining the same headcount of around 65 employees.

While the company's new strategic focus would be on e-commerce infrastructure provisioning she said the company would not be keeping all its eggs in one basket.

Among the new services under development were FlexiBill, an electronic bill presentation and payment package that would compete with NZ Post's eBill, and InfoXchange, a service being co-developed with Microsoft that would allow a single electronic invoice to be distributed to customers in multiple formats such as a fax, e-mail, or MYOB files.

Esolutions application infrastructure manager Johan Vendrig said FlexiBill would differ from the NZ Post system as it would work through the online portals of the major banks to give customers a greater measure of interaction.

Users would be able to click on details of their online statement to get an exploded view of individual items. For example, clicking on a monthly Telecom bill would reveal details of rental and call charges.

Mr Vendrig said esolutions expected all the major banks to participate in the service. Two banks had already registered.

FlexiBill will be used by Telecom for the online billing service it will launch in October but other utilities are expected to sign up for a wider launch next March.

Thereafter, esolutions is planning to use the big banks as resellers to market the service to smaller organisations.

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