IDIOM News
Global Interest in Start-Up's Software and Staff - September 2004
An Auckland software development start-up is poised for international success, with a mix of overseas investment and funding from Technology New Zealand having helped elevate it to the forefront of the global market place.
Idiom was founded just three years ago to develop and market the Idiom Decision Suite software that supports the automation of business decision making. Idiom has been designed to give business experts hands-on control over the definition and deployment of their business decisions, thereby removing much of the cost and risk normally associated with software development.
The Idiom Decision Suite is used by business analysts to model and define business decisions and the business rules that underpin them. It then automatically converts these rules into executable computer code and generates the English documentation, eliminating programming and ensuring accuracy and currency of documentation in the process. When the computer application requires a decision it calls Idiom and the decision is provided.
The software is already being used in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, in the health, insurance and finance industries, all of which are dealing with constant regulatory and market changes in a highly competitive environment. Its market potential is helped by its ability to work co-operatively with any of the mainstream IT infrastructures.
Idiom Chief Executive, Mark Norton, says the company is now signing major deals with international organisations. This success follows significant investment by United States-based partners Investors Guaranty™ Global Alliance (IGGA), together with investment of $270,000 from government R&D funding agency, Technology New Zealand.
"Gaining those investments means Idiom has completed its capital raising in one sweep and we are now able to launch our product internationally without going back to the well," Mr Norton says.
He says there had been sporadic contact over several years between Idiom's technology partner, RHE & Associates, and IGGA, but the investment deal itself was the result of introductions made during the 2003 America's Cup in Auckland.
"IGGA executives were here for the yachting and were instantly impressed with what Idiom is doing. They have taken a strategic interest in Idiom, not to turn us into a cash cow or for a quick capital gain, but because they see the value of our product to their own strategic plans. We're important to their bigger picture.
"The investment from Technology New Zealand, which helped us re-build our product to make it particularly suitable for the financial services industry, was equally important. If we had been solely relying on the American investment we would have risked running out of money before we turned cash flow positive.
"Now, we are launching internationally and our software has the potential to advance New Zealand's software profile globally."
A highlight of the recently completed R&D project is the development of world leading technology that means users can define and deploy business rules in near real-time without having to use technologists. The software has drag and drop graphics - a kind of 'smart lego' according to Mr Norton - to enable business analysts to manage the rules personally and deliver the outcomes in plain English, as well as computer code.
This feature is popular with customers - Mark Norton says a customer CEO recently emailed him to say: "I was going to try to play golf this afternoon but I'm having too much fun with this".
The graphical rules modelling has also attracted interest from Microsoft which is giving a high level of support to further development of Idiom's software.
Other outcomes of the R&D project mean the Decision Suite can now achieve ultra fast execution of large sets of business rules and accurately convert very large schemas into node trees for use as a dictionary of terms for rules definition.
Mark Norton says the skills that the company has developed during the project are obviously valuable and current because their core developers are being head-hunted on a regular basis.
"However we welcome the challenge of ensuring that these staff are rewarded appropriately in an exciting start-up situation."
Idiom's innovative decision-centric approach has been warmly received in the global business rules community with recent articles by Mr Norton in the Business Rules Journal and positive reviews by industry commentators.
As a result of this publicity, Mr Norton has been invited to speak at the premier event in the global business rules world, the EuroBizRules Conference in Amsterdam in June, where Idiom will be in the unique position of being a new brand at the conference.
Mr Norton believes Idiom's breakthrough with its software is partly the result of being a start-up company in a relatively isolated marketplace.
"We didn't go and see what others were doing and so were not distracted by the plethora of theories out there. Instead we remained committed to putting decision making at the centre of systems development thought, rather than taking the more traditional data or process approaches. New Zealand 100% pure common sense."
Idiom's R&D identified one challenge for New Zealand's software industry - Mr Norton says there is an acute shortage of skills in the area of testing and producing relevant documentation, with few tertiary institutions offering qualifications in this area.
"We advertised for a tester and received about 100 replies from software programmers willing to do testing - but none from people claiming expertise in testing. There is big demand for testers, while the market for programmers is already flooded and there is falling demand for them as software development becomes increasingly automated."
In both New Zealand and Australia Idiom has partnered with RHE & Associates, a New Zealand owned company focussed on developing and integrating application software solutions for major corporations and government. RHE Director Mark Hamilton says Idiom is winning his company business across the board in both Australia and New Zealand.
"As an early adopter of this technology we are blowing prospective clients away when we show then the impact that Idiom has on application cost and configurability".
Idiom's other partners include Healix, a local supplier to the health sector. Healix is taking the software into District Health Boards, with Canterbury and Capital & Coast already signed up. The company expects that the Healix-led developments will also be applicable in the international marketplace.
At the same time sales are continuing to the insurance and financial services sectors in Australia, and a large US partner is already introducing Idiom to its clients.