Melbourne developer Panviva sees exports surge

Melbourne ISV Panviva has begun notching up big wins accounting for some 50 percent of its revenue in overseas markets such as North America, the UK and Asia.

Effraim Herskovic, general manager of marketing and corporate at Panviva, said the developer had landed its first overseas deal two years ago -- a small contract with HP -- but export sales had swelled to account for 50 percent of its turnover in the last six months.

"It's been growing steadily and probably really ramped up in the last six months. It shot up from the low teens," Herskovic said.

Most of its sales were coming from the US and UK, he added.

He said Australian sales of its performance support software were growing through its direct and indirect channel but the company believed the bulk of its business would continue to come from abroad.

"Large multinationals are more able to [make] the investment," he said. "But, that said, there's a strong case for mid-size organisation and government as well, so we're starting to see takeup there too."

Last month, Panviva and reseller Mincom won a contract to supply its software to Canada's largest municipal electricity distributor, Toronto Hydro, Panviva said in a statement.

Panviva 6 software would support up to 350 concurrent users at the utility, which generated power for some 673,000 customers representing 18 percent of the power generated in the Canadian state of Ontario, the developer said.

The developer had also won a deal this week with heavy machinery maker Caterpillar Asia. Caterpillar would use Panviva 6 to support an SAP implementation in all its Asian manufacturing plants, Panviva said.

Caterpillar had also deployed Panviva across its global dealership network to help its dealers tap into Caterpillar's business systems, it said.

Herskovic said Panviva had been fighting Australian prejudice against homegrown developers but actually had few competitors internationally.

"It's still a fairly niche market. There's still probably only half a dozen companies that specialise in the area of performance support. Most of our competitors are in the US and a couple are UK companies," he said.

"Certainly, we're the only Australian performance support vendor."

Herskovic said Panviva's point of difference was it used a reference model method instead of a system simulation approach. The developer dealt a lot with structured documents whereas rivals tended mainly to focus on creating a simulation of the systems, he said.

"The advantage there is if you're looking for a bit of information, you can quite quickly drill down through a heavily structured document or our system will automatically point you to the correct document," Herskovic said.

Herskovic said Panviva had been around since 1996 as a professional services company but had transformed into a software company in 1999.