John Linton
I read a short piece in the SMH business section today about a Brisbane software development company selling its desktop to SMS software to a large Russian mobile carrier. In the same section was the report of Oracle buying BEA (a large middleware developer) for $US8.5 billion. There were references in that piece to the buying up of the three other major middleware development companies (Cognos by IBM, Business Objects by SAP and Hyperion, again by Oracle) - all for mega amounts of money.
When we first decided to 'create' Exetel we had the view that while we could build a pretty good communications company that would deliver the lowest price communications services in Australia what we could really do, if it all went well, was to create the best 'management' tools and systems needed to operate a business in the 21st century.
It was therefore a key objective to build Exetel from 'day one' based on what could be demonstrated to a future 'customer' in terms of the management and operational control systems that would be better than anything else available any where in Australia and the USA and Northern Europe. What better way to demonstrate business tools than by building the company based on them and being able to show what happened over a five year period in all the terms that a decision maker would want to consider?
Based on most commonly regarded keys to business efficiency, Exetel's systems already make Exetel ahead of 'world's best practices' in almost every major operational area and, without knowing more than is on the public record, significantly more efficient than any other ISP or comms company in Australia even at this early stage of the development of those tools. Exetel's revenue per employee, customer per employee, speed of response to major business transactions and problem resolution are what most companies only dream about.
Of course, there is a long way to go and four years of start up operation isn't anything to really hang your hat on in terms of demonstrating sustainability or even transference to another industry or marketplace set and I'm very definitely not getting 'ahead of myself' in valuing the Exetel software systems we currently use. However it is quite evident to me, again based only on my experience with other companies in the communications industry, that we have an integrated platform that can easily and continually be developed to refine and improve every aspect of processing and controlling a wide range of transactions for a wide range of products and services that is better, by far, than anything I've ever seen anywhere I've ever worked before.
Our original idea, and only vaguely outlined back in December 2003, was that we would build a unique 'best of breed' set of facilities (software, phone, management, control, dispersed operational, multi market, environmentally responsible, etc) based on open source components (MySQL, Asterix, Linux) and integrate what we could find on the open source 'market' (Help Desk, Accounting, SPAM filtering and so on) and then make them available to anyone who wanted them on an open source basis provided they in turn made their changes and enhancements similarly available.
While it would be nice to think we could sell the code for $US8.5 billion at some future time and maybe we would eventually decide to make the products commercial the original idea was not to do that. Our, pointlessly altruistic some cynics would say (or more likely they would use the "W" word), idea was to contribute to making business more efficient in Australia and therefore more competitive and in that way make a contribution to the country which has been so very good to us.
We are a long way from making the code of the things we do very well available as a FFU product but we will start in early February to publish some of the things we've found most useful and make them available to anyone who wishes to download them. We will continue adding to these downloads over the balance of 2008 to determine if there is any real interest in what we have created.
We will use a 'wiki' type distribution service and link it from the small and large business sections of the Exetel web site over the next few days.