Well, a little longer actually as the company founded by Adrian Di Marco started in Brisbane in 1987 to develop its own accounting software. Fast forward to 1999 when it went public, and that is where the 17 years start from.
That it moved into education, health and community services, utilities, government, financial services and managed services sectors and is now reflected in the fact that it is Australia's largest enterprise software company and one of Australia's top 200 ASX-listed companies, with offices across six countries – not to shoddy for a banana bender. The ASX release is here.
Underpinning its solid growth was TechnologyOne’s cloud first, mobile first strategy. For a second consecutive year, TechnologyOne’s Software as a Service (SaaS) business grew by more than 100%, while license fees grew by 14%.
Executive Chairman Adrian Di Marco, said, “We’ve experienced huge growth in SaaS, with our largest wins in 2016 all coming from SaaS. This is across all industries, from the federal government to local government, education and financial services, which speaks volumes about the market shift towards a cloud first, mobile first world.”
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“Organisations are rapidly gaining a more sophisticated understanding of the difference between SaaS and cloud hosting, and are clearly opting for the economies of scale and long-term strategic benefits only offered by SaaS providers,” he said.
Di Marco has been very vocal in warning that hosting providers cannot keep pace with the evolving mass production capabilities of SaaS. That is why, rather than ‘lifting and shifting’ to the cloud TechnologyOne made a huge investment in delivering its enterprise software as SaaS.
“SaaS will signal the demise of much of the current IT industry. In 10 years, more than 50% of the current IT providers will be obsolete. Much like mass production signalled the demise of the cottage industries during the industrial revolution; the IT industry is now going through a similar revolution - a digital revolution. Only those IT companies that can achieve massive economies of scale through SaaS will survive,” he said.
Research and Development (R&D) continued to be a significant investment for TechnologyOne at $46 million for the full year, which is 19% of revenue fully expensed in the year it is incurred.
Note: the author holds no shares but has watched TechnologyOne start, take enormous risks, grow and prosper. He is a reformed banana bender who now lives in Sydney and does not know what football team to barrack for but likes to give coverage to tech from the Sunshine State - go Broncos.