NZ presence backed by California flying squad

By ADAM GIFFORD

Bucking a trend in which international software vendors service New Zealand from Australia, application and e-business integration tools provider SeeBeyond, formerly STC, has opened offices in Auckland and Wellington.

Australasian managing director Des Powell said the company, founded in Monrovia, California, in 1989, had been in Australia for almost five years but needed critical mass to jump the Ditch.

"We now have 43 people in Australia, mostly technical, so we know the resource is there to back up the New Zealand operation," Mr Powell said.

"There's also a dedicated flying squad in California who can go anywhere in the world at any time to sort out any problems."

The New Zealand general manager, Rob Erskine, comes to the position after 21 years at Unisys. Two sales staff have been taken on in Auckland and Cliff Teasdale in Wellington. SeeBeyond sells through partners as well as direct, with EDS, Accenture, CSC, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young building up SeeBeyond practices.

Despite its late arrival, SeeBeyond has five existing New Zealand customers: four health care organisations and Griffins.

"SeeBeyond started off making a health sector product for central patient indexes, then was relaunched for a broader commercial market," Mr Powell said.

Mr Erskine said SeeBeyond's tools allow large organisations to take the data they have in legacy, CRM (customer relationship management), resource planning and other systems and exchange it easily between applications. The core of the product is eGate, which does application to application integration within an organisation.

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