Published on the 21/03/2014 | Written by Clare Coulson
Despite a reputation for focusing on ‘made in Jade’ and selling off its best innovations, Jade Software has solid plans for success in the modern marketplace…
In January 2013 Jade Software announced that it would henceforth operate as two discrete operations – Jade and Wynyard Group, with the latter listing on the main board of the New Zealand Stock Exchange some six months later. Today David Lindsay, managing director of Jade, said at a media event, that most people have been asking him what Jade will do now – a question which has been asked several times throughout Jade’s history as it sold LINC, its healthcare business and its HR business.
“We are not going to do anything differently. We have innovation in our blood, in our DNA, and it has been for 35 years. We’ve shown a unique and innate ability to bring to market some great business applications and build some really compelling and valuable businesses for our shareholders and that’s what we are going to continue to do,” Lindsay explained.
He said the source of Jade’s innovation is usually collaboration with its clients and called Wynyard “a real milestone in innovation for Jade” as it was incubated within the company before being released to the New Zealand market where it is doing well.
Wynyard also generated $35 million in cash for Jade upon listing, a significant amount of which its shareholders have allowed Jade to keep for investment in future innovation.
Jade’s financial results are due out in a few weeks and, while they are yet to be audited, Lindsay said that in broad terms they will show the company has a lot of money in the bank, has made a reasonable profit and that there has been growth across the business.
He said Jade will now be investing deeply in accelerating revenue growth and building out its product set with a “tight focus” on three business units: technologies, enterprise solutions and logistics. It will continue to focus on innovation, bringing new products to market, growing what it has, in particular in the US and UAE, and potentially opening up new markets in Asia and Africa.
While Lindsay said he would consider an IPO “down the track” there are no plans for one at present, and he sees the major opportunities for Jade being in the logistics area and the mobile market.
He said Jade has the opportunity to become the number one supplier for terminal operating systems for ports dealing with mixed containers – a niche market worth $0.75 billion, but with only four main players. There is also the opportunity to extend beyond the port supply chain, the next step being a push into the warehousing environment. He also hopes that with 80 percent of IT spend estimated to be going towards customer engagement applications, Jade’s digital business will grow at 100 percent per year, despite the crowded mobile market.
Although Jade Software is famous for the eponymous Jade software development and deployment platform, Lindsay said that today not everything has to be ‘made in Jade’. “We are not the tech bigots we used to be,” he said, explaining that most of the mobile offerings are not built in Jade and the company is mostly in need of html, java script and .NET programmers when it comes to code. The difficulty, he said, is attracting good talent in such a competitive market and he thinks that New Zealand IT is being held back by our education system.
