Software company ready to expand into Australian bank market

By ADAM GIFFORD

Mathias Client Management Software is readying a push of its New Zealand-developed customer relationship management (CRM) software into Australian banks.

Chairman Dr Peter Mathias said the decision to open a Sydney sales office was a consequence of the company moving its development operation from London to Auckland. Mathias-CMS has more than 20 developers here, mostly returning expatriates, but it plans to more than double that during the next year.



"While we have never viewed the Australian market as attractive, and financially it is not, if we do not have local clients we will not have people in our development shop who have the domain expertise that we need," Mathias said during a visit to open his firm's new Newmarket office last week.

Mathias said his second priority was developing a global relationship with industry giant IBM.

"In the next six months we want two successful implementations with them in Europe and one in Australia. Once we do that in two separate countries that far away, we will have credibility," Mathias said.

The software grew out of the Mathias consulting practice, which is focused around major banks and professional service organisations. With IBM, his company will have better access to the Lotus Notes market of 90 million licences and 40 million active users worldwide.

"If we got a million seats on Lotus, and it's not a pipedream to do that, it would make us one of the largest CRM companies in the world as far as user numbers go."

That is not to say other platforms are ignored. The development team has just completed work on integrating the McMS product with Outlook.

Mathias said the team will have rebuilt the next version of the product in J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) by the end of June. That is when implementation is due to start if it wins bids to provide CRM systems for two major European banks and for a Big 5 consulting firm, which wants a pilot system involving 6000 partners.

The Mathias-CMS product uses email as a workflow instrument. Mathias said improving workflow was the key to increasing productivity in service organisations, which had found productivity per person declined the larger they got.

He said CRM systems had to use technology people use as part of their daily life.