Tower to IPO and retain Aussie identity
Tower to IPO and retain Aussie identity
Tower Software held its first ever press conference today, despite 20 years of sustained success in Australia and around the world, and revealed its plans to float on the stock market and launch fiercely into the enterprise content management market with a number of acquisitions.
The Canberra based company of 130,000 people, many of which work overseas, expects to be ready for the float by end of this year.
Its TRIM Context software is a records management solution is used in governments and enterprises around the world, including Europe and North America.
When Tower Software moved from providing a records management system towards also providing document management solutions, it collided with a number of different companies based in North America and Canada, but still managed to hold its own globally.
It has continued to win major contracts over the years, for example, it is currently rolling out its software to 360,000 users, and is expected to finish this deployment in June.
In Australia alone, 80 percent of all the federal agency governments use Tower's product.
In the year 2000, about 90 percent of the company's new licence revenue came from Australia, however last year that was down to 30 percent, but this expected to drop to 20 percent by end of this year. Martin Harwood, the managing director of TOWER Software explained why these statistics have changed.
"We basically changed the business from being largely a local business into being a truly international one. That was absolutely necessary because if we wanted to be a global player, we had to recognise that the marketplace is not in Australia. 62 percent of our market is in America."
He said that TOWER Software has helped organisations solve their problems that people have in deploying solutions that meet their needs for enterprise document and records management. However, the company is now making strides to serve the marketplace which has been going through another round of consolidation for the last two years.
"The major industry analysts, such as Gartner and IDC are now talking about the rise of enterprise content management. This is about a whole bunch of technologies that used to be disparate, but now come together as a single enterprise solution. That's record and document management, imaging, workflow, collaboration and web content management.
"Of that set, with our own product, we have an answer for all of it, but part of our answer today is an OEM product, particular around web content management. Our product strategy is to complete our ECM story with our own product this year. That will probably be a local acquisition. We are actively looking at that as we speak."
Harwood said that there are 46 web content management solutions in Australia, which are Australian developed.
Harwood's vision for the company, as it moves towards the ECM model, is for the company's software to be deployed on the desktop on every enterprise client in the world.
In order to do this, Harwood said that the company needs to drastically increase the company's revenue, although it has been very successful as a private company with internal funds, up until now.
So TOWER Software is now looking to investigate the possibility of an IPO over the next 12 months. It hopes this step will take it into to new markets too, such Italy, Germany and France, where it has not operated in yet.
Harwood believes that Australia has some of the best software programmers in the world, and he does not want to outsource any of the code building to other countries, because he wants to retain the Australian identity of the company as it moves forward.
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