Unblinded by the light

Whitech Software Solutions no longer need hide its light under a bushel. The abilities of this Sydney developer have begun shining out far and wide.

In some cultures, white is the colour of death, mourning and ghosts. That could not be farther from the truth for Telstra’s National and New South Wales Small Business of the Year -- Whitech Software Solutions.

Steve Delnawaz, founder and managing director of Whitech, says the company’s name was chosen partly because white also represents all the colours of the rainbow. Mix all wavelengths in the visible spectrum together, and the result is radiant white light. Like the sunlight.

“We liked it because white is for purity,” Delnawaz says. “And we can use it as a platform for working with Kodak’s yellow, Fuji’s green and Konica’s blue and blend all the colours.”

A POS-itive slant
 
It's just over 10 years since Whitech started up in May 1995. Delnawaz was at university at the time, with just three subjects left to complete his degree. “Then, this started to take off. My brother had just opened a photo shop and was looking for a POS program,” he recalls. “I wrote him one for free -- typical family stuff!”

Much to his surprise, people coming into his brother’s photo shop were impressed with his innovative POS application, initially dubbed Controlab, and began asking where it came from and whether they could get a copy for themselves.

Forced on to the horns of a dilemma, Delnawaz chose to concentrate on the opportunity presented by the new application and formed an embryonic company, at the same time ditching his degree. And it would seem he has no regrets -- none worth making a song and dance over, anyway. “I had to make a decision,” he says.

He had written the application in his spare time, drawing on programming skills he had acquired as a teenager by experimenting on the family computer.

“I got sick of playing games on the thing and started to hack into it and program it,” he says. “When I went to high school, I did a computer programming unit and did extremely well at that.”

Delnawaz stands out in a more familiar crowd of grey businessperson types for his exuberance and ability to laugh at himself and at the quirks of the world. Some unkind or jealous types might call that naïveté. Others might say he has just the right combination of faith, optimism and enthusiasm to succeed where more conventional approaches have failed.

That is certainly the slant the judges seemed to favour in this year’s Telstra Small Business Awards. Whitech Software Solutions won the NSW Small Business of the Year accolade, and then beat out the other semi-finalists to take the top prize. The Telstra Small Business of the Year Awards are arguably the most coveted prizes in the SMB community.

Bizarrely, Telstra is somewhat wary about saying why its judges favoured any particular company and has refused to comment in detail on how Whitech won the competition.

All Telstra would concede that it was a combination of a range of criteria that netted Whitech the top award, out of a field of 31 other finalists from around Australia.

Whitech has since announced that all the $38,000 prize money from its NSW and national Telstra awards has been donated to the Cancer Council of NSW for Daffodil Day.

“We’ve had a very good few years -- 2001 was very difficult, and in 2000 the market crashed. We weren’t directly affected by the dotcom stuff, but we were indirectly. Since then, it has been fantastic,” Delnawaz says.

Whitech is making a profit of around 33 percent before tax and its margins are growing. Turnover has increased 120 percent year-on-year. “We’re growing exponentially, year-on-year,” he says.

In English heraldry, white signified brightness, virtue and innocence. In Whitech’s case, those traits may be leading to quite some celebration and have seemingly helped Delnawaz forge his own approach untainted by prior business experience.