Local businesses seek more sophisticated IT applications

Western Australia’s strong economy and businesses’ growing appreciation of the internet’s potential are combining to attract significant new investment to the IT sector in this state, especially online .

Those within the web industry say that, during the past two years, businesses in WA have significantly upped both their initial investment and ongoing spend on website technology.

Clue Design director Michael Craig said this was a result of increased confidence in website technology, and the state’s mining boom.

“Many resources companies are overhauling their websites, however a flow-on effect is that many small businesses are sprouting up servicing the industry,” he said.

“Human resources, accounting and business services companies are the ones which are driving much of the demand at the moment.”

A corollary of the mining boom – WA’s skills shortage – is also driving increased investment.

According to Eduka Solutions Pty Ltd managing director, Ashul Shah, there is a growing realisation that website technology affords greater efficiency in a candidate-short market.

“Businesses are finding that, in a big skills shortage, the best way to alleviate that is to automate your processes,” he told WA Business News.

Mr Shah said companies were requesting functions to automate their administrative and clerical tasks, and were installing customer self-service devices on their websites, to automate database management.

In addition, companies were increasingly utilising their websites for staff recruitment, both as a direct marketing space to communicate their brand to potential candidates, and as a tool for processing candidate data.

During the past six months, a significant number of businesses has requested interfaces between their websites and employment websites, such as SEEK or MyCareer, as well as installing direct recruitment functions, according to web development companies.

However, the trend towards greater investment is driven by more than simply a response to the current labour shortage.

Miles Burke, managing director of BAM Creative, said there was a growing awareness in WA of what was available online.

“People are coming to us with far more advanced requests,” he said.

Blogging tools, intranets and extranets, custom web software, knowledge sharing systems and advanced publishing systems are being adopted by more businesses, from top-tier companies to SMEs.

Commonly, businesses are adding to their basic website packages with online marketing functions, search engine optimisation tools and email marketing.

Customer relationship management systems – a worldwide billion-dollar industry, according to Microsoft – are also more widely used to centralise client information and track inquiries.

According to Clue Design’s Michael Craig, the appeal for businesses is that a large amount of online information can be collected and analysed, which may be useful to the offline business, in terms of consumer behaviour and demography.

“The general feeling that business is starting to get is that a website is a very powerful tool and can really make a strong return on investment if it’s done right,” Mr Craig said.

“We had a client that was selling agricultural software and spending thousands of dollars on their website, but didn’t have a statistical package. Once we started tracking inquiries, they found traffic from the US and overseas, which meant thousands of dollars worth of potential inquiries. They introduced free international shipping and restructured the whole business offline, because they never knew the demand was out there.”

Other functions – including shopping cart and ordering payment systems – are being adopted due to the growth of e-commerce, not only in the retail sector but in business-to-business as well.

For SMEs in particular, e-commerce is attracting a lot of interest, with more sophisticated online payment systems, such as digital gold currency and LUUP (mobile phone payments), being adopted.

FX Digital Pty Ltd managing director Steve Cartwright said the general optimism created by the boom had encouraged people to invest in tech projects.

He said his business was taking a lot of e-commerce SME projects, such as online stores, across a range of industries.

“We’re probably taking three e-commerce orders to one normal order. We offer three packages to SME businesses, and we’re selling three e-commerce packages, which are the most expensive, for every one of the middle-range packages,” Mr Cartwright said.

The advent of faster broadband is one factor that has accelerated the take-up of online applications, such as video and audio functions.

It has also encouraged the use of web applications for accounting and relationship management systems.

Itomic Pty Ltd managing director Ross Gerring said a lot of the technology had been available for some time, but was only now being adopted.

“The uptake in broadband has made lots of things viable that were possible years ago, but were limited by the speed of the average connection,” he said.

“The faster broadband gets, the more certain activities become viable, such as voice-over IP.”

While voice-over IP, or VOIP, is yet to be adopted by mainstream users , its use as a cheaper alternative to landline phone connections was becoming more attractive to businesses, particularly for those with interstate operations.