Web company Singos for its supper

Victorian web-based services provider WDG has bought online marketing company ResultMedia for a seven-figure sum.

Arthur Spanos, CEO at WDG, said he could not disclose the actual price paid for ResultMedia, citing restrictions by John Singleton-owned STW Communications, which owns 49 percent of WDG. However, he added that the price came to “seven figures”.

Spanos said the 100 percent buyout would help round out WDG's portfolio of web services, web development and web consulting services, including advanced search engine technologies and online analytics.

“The opportunity came up to make an offer, and we're expanding our service offering,” he said.

ResultMedia, a specialist in internet-based marketing, had an office in Melbourne and 15 staff. No redundancies were scheduled and both companies would continue to operate under their own branding, Spanos said.

WDG was a Microsoft partner, committed to .NET development and that would not change, Spanos said.

“But [now] we'll have an ability to call on some open source expertise, particularly useful with some of the larger corporates. They've all got some open source experimentation going forward,” he said.

Spanos said WDG had been growing strongly and was expecting to grow 84 percent this year.

“We've got a number of other things happening for us -- we're now providing services to Asia for one of our clients,” he said.

If the IT sector continued to pick up, there was no reason to expect that 84 percent growth might not be achievable for what Spanos termed WDG's “tributary” IT services.

“This growth was always there, but a couple of years ago a lot of our competitors went belly up,” Spanos said. “We're now achieving scale.”

Although economic downturns caused pain for individuals and downward pressure on prices, Spanos added, he believed it could be good overall for businesses as it forced them to exploit niches and become more competitive.

“We've grown about 40 to 60 percent this year,” he said.

WDG, which now has 60 staff based in Sydney, Auckland and two Melbourne offices, last year signed with Scottish knowledge management developer Infogistics to distribute its RealTerm artificial intelligence-based search engine technology.