A Calgary-based business software developer has signed a deal to offer its Internet-delivered services Down Under.
Closer to home, electroBusiness.com Inc. has also signed an agreement to provide integration services throughout Western Canada for Ormed Information Systems Ltd. of Edmonton, which designs information systems for more than 300 hospitals.
Seeing Australia as a tremendous new opportunity for business-to-business e-commerce, electroBusiness has signed a letter of intent with two Australian companies to start a subsidiary in the antipodes. AUSTEP Strategic Partnering Pty. Ltd. and Whitehorse Consulting Group, both of Australia, will immediately pay electroBusiness $120,000 to cover the costs of establishing and licencing the company’s eBusiness Utility product on Australian soil.
The Calgary company could theoretically deliver its applications online from here, noted electroBusiness marketing director Dave Bischoff, but decided that “if we’re going to sell into that market, it has to be an Australia-based solution.”
Said electroBusiness CEO Cal Fairbanks, who will be chairman of the new company: “We will be fulfilling an economic and political need to embrace a … solution that is staffed and managed by Australians.”
The company spent more than two years developing its business-to-business applications platform in Calgary, Bischoff told Business Edge. The company’s software is designed to “provide a secure, robust e-commerce infrastructure” for companies that want to transfer cash and data online.
The new company is being established to capitalize on recent announcements by the Australian government and by corporations there that will lead to the establishment of e-procurement marketplaces in Australia. These initiatives will result in the creation of as much as $4-billion (Aus.) in online procurement business, electroBusiness says.
The deal with Ormed will see electroBusiness provide its e-Business Utility to Ormed’s new ORMED X online exchange through which the health-care industry can purchase supplies. Ormed has identified more than 500 vendors in Canada as key suppliers to join the online exchange.
“Ormed will focus on developing their health-care management software to interface the buyers into ORMED X while we focus on interfacing the suppliers to these buyers and to ORMED X via the e-Business Utility,” Fairbanks said.
The e-Business Utility acts as a universal translator to integrate vendors’ systems to multiple exchanges or procurement systems, as well as providing small to medium sized businesses with their own procurement engines, the company says.
