by Brad Howarth (The Australian)
SOFTWARE: While few Australia software-as-a-service companies have yet turned to the Asian market, Sydney-based ipSCAPE has gone in guns blazing.
ipSCAPE is the developer of a cloud-based contact centre system. In July it announced that it had received a strategic investment from Telstra’s Applications and Ventures Group, and that Telstra Global had agreed to take ipSCAPE into the Asian market as the core of its Virtual Contact Centre (VCC) solution.
Chief executive officer of ipSCAPE Simon Burke says the partnership will accelerate his company’s entry into the Asian market.
“We have a vision which is definitely international,” Mr Burke says. “We can focus on the software, they (Telstra) can provide what they are good at, which is the provision of a highly resilient voice and data network.”
Mr Burke says the investment is less than $5 million, and is for a minority stake in his business. According to the director of portfolio and marketing at Telstra Global, Nathan Bell, his organisation has identified a number of early sales leads, and is using ipSCAPE for its service desk, with 50 seats implemented and another 50 expected to be added. Mr Bell says Telstra Global’s approach to Asian markets is based on providing tools that customers can add on to their existing infrastructure, rather than promoting wholesale replacements.
“One of the things we are looking at is how we help customers transition more into the cloud, and we do that by giving them services that are adaptable to what they are doing and can augment to what they have today,” Mr Bell says.
A key reason why Telstra chose ipSCAPE was that it was a true cloud solution, not just a hosted solution. Mr Bell says it means it is easier for Telstra Global to focus on multiple markets simultaneously while allowing clients to take a more flexible approach to what they acquire.
“Everyone says there is growth in the Asia-Pac region, but no one can look in a crystal ball and tell you where the growth is going to come from consistently for the next four to five years.” While Mr Bell expects the initial activity to come from Singapore and Hong Kong, and particularly through existing Telstra clients that are expanding in those markets, he says he is also seeing great demand from the Philippines.