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Cloud start-up: Gary Turner relates the story of Xero

Xero is a tremendously successful cloud-based software start-up that was created in that well-known heart of software entrepreneurship... excuse me, did you just say New Zealand? Jyoti Banerjee talks to Gary Turner about the plusses and minuses of being a software start-up from a small economy but which has scaled to over 150,000 global customers in 6 years.

 

Bruntwood builds value in property through employees and community

As UK property loses its gloss, one business continues to build value in this space. Jyoti Banerjee met up with Chris Oglesby of Bruntwood to learn how its long-term thinking has enabled it to succeed where short-term profit-seekers have lost out.

Bruntwood was started in 1977 buying out old industrial property. In the 1990s, it decided to move into the provision of office space.  Chris Oglesby took over the running of the company from his father Michael who was the founder. Today, the company employs 450 people, up from twelve in the early 1990s, and has converted an initial investment of £50,000 in 1976 into a net worth of £330 million.

Over the company’s life, it has experienced growth of over 20% per annum. Typically, the funding for this has come from banks as private equity funders have been much more aggressive in their demands. However, there is a new stream of funding entering the market. As Oglesby points out, “The main change in the market is that annuity funds are entering it and they are long-term lenders. The fact that we are a long-term family business gives us a good position in that market.” As a result, Bruntwood has recently agreed a £130 million debt facility from a life fund.

“Family businesses, when they are good, are one of the best forms of ownership,” says Oglesby. However finding equity finance that is matched and aligned to our family values is difficult.”

Access aCloud: new tricks from an old dog

Access Group’s new cloud-based collaboration platform offers a new and powerful way to allow customers, suppliers and company employees to work with each other. Jyoti checks out some neat new tricks from an old dog.

While small businesses are showing plenty of alacrity in adopting cloud-based solutions, mid-sized companies are a little more hesitant. The business problems they face are often complex, and yet the solutions have to be manageable in the context of a company that may have quite a small or limited IT capability. Typically, they deploy feature-rich software packages that are installed on servers within their own company boundaries. Moving such solutions to the cloud would be challenging because the features they need might not be available in such systems. Plus, they would not dare waste the significant investment already made in their on-premises software.

Yet, mid-market CEOs are unable to deny that today’s tech tsunamis – mobile, social media, big data and the cloud – are powerful forces shaking the entire business landscape across the world. Can they really ignore such cataclysmic events because their software is too expensive to change or too old to manoeuvre?

This is the context in which Access Group, a Colchester-based mid-market business applications software company, has launched aCloud, a collaboration platform that enables a company to leverage the investments made in its existing business software by adding cloud-based services on top.

The new platform enables customers, suppliers and the employees of a company to message each other and track activities and information relating to transactions they are engaged in. By opening up visibility of invoices and statements outside the accounting function, issues can be picked up sooner and dealt with before they become problems.  aCloud tackles the thorny problem of expense management by enabling employees to use their mobile devices to send in their expense claims. Jon Jorgensen, group sales director at Access, told me that he sends in an image of his train ticket via aCloud into the expense management system while still waiting for his train at the platform.

ITU launches sustainability toolkit for tech

Jyoti was at Green Standards Week in Paris where he spoke at the launch of ITU's new environmental sustainability toolkit for tech companies. Here's how the standards are developing to enable the management of sustainability performance in ICT companies.

On September 20th, the International Telecommunications Union, the UN body tasked with setting standards in the technology sector, is launching an environmental toolkit aimed at helping ICT companies manage their sustainability performance. Fronesys was glad to help ITU get the toolkit together [Disclosure: I am a partner at Fronesys and led the work on the toolkit].

Over fifty tech companies from around the world contributed to this toolkit. We made a significant contribution of our own: we wrote two of the seven documents in the toolkit, and edited the whole effort.

There is no shortage of standards, guidelines and tools targeting the sustainability performance of the technology sector. Why do we need another one? The problem with existing material is that none of it is comprehensive in coverage of all the major activities of an ICT organisation. And most are not practical in allowing the integration of regulatory compliance, good practice and business performance. This toolkit aims at just such a balancing act.

Puma searches for a sustainable edge

Puma, the sports goods company, is on the search for alternative materials it can make its products from, shifting from its traditional use of virgin raw materials, like leather and rubber. In doing this, it is one of many companies in its industry seeking to find more sustainable ways to source and sell its products. But the journey Puma has taken may well have given it an innovation advantage over its competitors.

The genesis of Puma’s sustainability efforts came from the attacks sports goods companies were receiving from activists regarding their use of Asian sweatshops.  The company’s initial attempts to engage with its supply chain were based on the industry playbook, auditing its key suppliers and putting good practice standards in place. But Puma went further than its competition in one respect: it sought to create a single model by which all of the company’s external social and environmental impacts can be compared.

Puma chose to denominate its external environmental, social and economic impacts in monetary terms. As a result, the business is able to make comparisons of these impacts in a much more wholistic way across the organisation. Plus, it gained insights on how to make business decisions, as it was looking at a much wider set of data than it had before.

Post-carbon: is it even possible?

We don't think today's industrial framework can continue as before. But what comes next? Some are exploring new forms of capitalism. Jyoti Banerjee explores the post-carbon framework laid out in Jeremy Rifkin's Third Industrial Revolution.

Note: For the hawk-eyed among you, this is a cross-posting from the Fronesys blog.

Basic proposition
Our industrial civilisation is at a crossroads. Oil and other fossil fuel energies that make up our industrial way of life are sunsetting, and the technologies made from and propelled by these energies are antiquated. The entire industrial infrastructure built on the back of fossil fuels is aging and in disrepair. The result is that unemployment is rising to dangerous levels all over the world.

Governments, businesses and consumers are awash in debt, and living standards are plummeting. A record one billion humans face hunger and starvation.  Worse, climate change from fossil fuel-based industrial activity looms on the horizon - cataclysmic change in the temperature and chemistry of the planet.
 
This is the setting for Jeremy Rikfin's key proposition in his book, Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World - "Great economic revolutions occur when new communications technologies converge with new energy systems."

How can we understand these elements of a revolution? Energy systems make possible the creation of more interdependent economic activity and expanded economic exchange, and facilitate more dense and inclusive social relationships.  On the other hand, a communications revolution provides the means to organise the manage the new temporal and spatial dynamics that arise from new energy systems.

Rifkin's vision of a Third Industrial Revolution is based on the meeting of two key revolution components: Internet technologies plus renewables. But what would this look like? Hundreds of millions of people will produce their own renewable energy in homes, offices and factories and share it with each other in an "energy internet."

If Rifkin is right, the implication would be a fundamental re-ordering of human relationships: how we conduct business, govern society, educate our children and engage in civic life.