Stepping up to own the software

going to provide that support. “Do you want to be having to divert your sales people towards supporting a software product?” Frith asks.

GetData tackled this issue with a mixture of luck and hard work.
“Support is a nightmare, really,” says Henley.

“If someone has a problem with data recovery software they need a response right away or they are going to go off and find another solution. Good support is absolutely essential. I can guarantee that for every person who calls us and alerts us to a problem, there are 15 more who haven’t bothered to
call – they’ve gone off to find a solution elsewhere.”

The directors therefore spent an enormous amount of time supporting the software in the initial years, finding the problems and fixing the bugs, until they came up with a product they considered to be stable. “I think we have fixed 90 percent of the problems. Of course it’s the other 10 percent which take up 80 percent of our time.”

From that point GetData took the innovative step of forming a strategic alliance with a US company that now supports all their software.

“Our partner in the US, a sister company really, had developed in a similar way to us and was selling complementary security software. They were already skilled in solving problems with hard drives. We formed a relationship with them that sees us cross-sell each other’s products and they provide the support for all the products. We settle up the [financial] differences at the end of the day.”

GetData regards this arrangement as ideal, as it has provided the company with professional support without the need to invest in its own support team.

Turning IP into products
Brian Cook has discovered that doing things backwards can be very beneficial. “To successfully turn IP [intellectual property] into products, you kind of have to work in reverse,” says the CEO of Melbourne company Nintex, a product-based spin-off from services company OBS.

“It helps us to think of the marketing and then work out what to build.”
Cook’s insights come from experiences that started in 1999, the year OBS opened for business providing collaboration tools for enterprises such as BHP, Santos and Ericsson. “We found ourselves building similar kinds of tools all the time,” Cook recalls. “In lunchtime conversations we all asked if we could package them and sell them.”

The company’s initial foray did not go well. “In 2002 we had a go. In retrospect it was technically a good idea but may not have met a market need. The product was hard to install and hard to trial.”

But in 2003 the company tried again, this time using a more easily identifiable market opportunity. “When Microsoft released SharePoint server 2003 we noticed some holes in the product and decided to fill them,” Cook says. A product called SmartLibrary and a workflow tool followed. “This time we made them very easy to install and trial,” Cook says.

OBS also created Nintex to help the new products grow. “We decided to create the Nintex brand in 2003 to be able to sell the technology to our services competitors,” Cook says. “We also wanted to create a different brand profile. The products are about ease of use, ease of installation. The services brand is about capability and complex thinking. Those are two very different propositions so there was a clear marketing need for the separate brand.”
But while the two brands are very separate, OBS’ and Nintex’s team are one and the same.

“Most of the coding for Nintex is done by people on rotation from the services business,” Cook explains. This adds welcome diversity to staff’s jobs and also Nintex has a pool of labour it can draw on as needed.

Nintex now accounts for 30 percent of OBS’ revenue, and Cook hopes this will increase to 50 percent over the next three to four years.

Adding that kind of revenue would not have been possible without creating the new brand. And Cook feels it benefits the business in other ways too. “One of unexpected bonuses is that innovation from the services side of the business inspires the products, and vice versa,” he says, adding that he feels other resellers can experience similar success with a few basic steps.

“Take a look at what you are good at, look at the IP you have and where customers might want to use it,” he advises. Then get into reverse gear:
Nintex has found it is a great way to go forward.

Use the industry
IT resellers should also remember that the industry they work in fosters ideas and helps business bring them to market.

Microsoft, for example, operates a network of “.Net clusters” that are specifically designed to help small software developers. “Microsoft wants to build a solutions portfolio so if someone has come up with a solution, we want to shine a light on