Stone thrown across the ditch

By Paul Montgomery

Datamail, the largest integrated document management company in New Zealand, it chose this year to test the waters for offering services to not only Australia, but the US and UK.

Andrew Perrier, product manager for VRetrieve at Datamail, said a combination of lower labour market costs and competitive communication rates made New Zealand attractive to users around the region.

"To the US and UK, we are saying we can provide indexing," said Mr Perrier. "Why would they send it to New Zealand instead of India? We have a much closer timeframe. India is as far as you can possibly get. New Zealand is only a day plus 3 hours time difference to Los Angeles. When it's 8am here, it's 11am there. That means we can have interactivity without people having to be up at all hours all over the world."

Mr Perrier said the required investment level for comparable US and United Kingdom services was twice what Datamail's would be, partially due to the depressed NZ dollar.

However, this does not suggest that Datamail's offering is not competitive - the company has a great deal of intellectual property in its own right, along with decades' worth of experience to back it up. Datamail has its own document management software platform, VRetrieve, which is a hosted storage and retrieval application for any and all forms of unstructured data.

"Rather than companies having to invest the extra capital and resources, we can manage all that. Through the use of the Internet, it doesn't matter where the customers are.

Datamail has only started its expansion in the last couple of months, according to Mr Perrier, but he said he was already talking to Australian application service providers with a view to hosting imaging functions with VRetrieve. The company uses security provider Sytec to provide protection for corporate data stored within VRetrieve, and it will replicate this relationship in Australia.

"Some companies treat New Zealand as another state of Australia," he said. "We are having to go to Australia to get decisions, because some IT decisions are driven out of Australia. That is being more customer-driven due to being based out of Australia. That is what is driving us more to the Australian market yet."