New deal for Empired

SOFTWARE company Empired Limited has secured a State Government contract to deliver the public service’s employment requirements online.

The system, Recruitment Advertising and Management Systems, or RAMS, will allow all public service agencies to be able to complete multiple employment services via a single point of entry.

Empired executive director Gavin Burnett said the RAMS contract was worth more than $500,000 over a three-year period.

The system will be rolled out to agencies through the Department of Premier and Cabinet by December.

Mr Burnett said a cornerstone of RAMS would be Empired’s flagship product, BigRedSky recruitment advertising software package.

The contract is the latest in a string of contract wins for Empired, which have included deals signed with Sons of Gwalia, Caltex, the City of Fremantle and the Port of Brisbane.

Empired also signed a contract with Edith Cowan University in May to expedite the academic promotion process.

Mr Burnett said the ECU implementation created interest from other universities in Australia and overseas.

The company was in discussions with “more than a dozen” universities that were evaluating the software for their annual academic promotions process, he said.

In light of the recent growth, Mr Burnett said a public listing was one of the options the company was currently evaluating.

“Our business has grown dramatically in the past 18 months and we are considering our options,” he said.

“We are considering our capital requirements at present and one of those options could be a listing.”

Mr Burnett was quick to add that any capital raising would be to further commercialise the business, as the Empired product offering “was complete”.

Mr Burnett said the company had won contracts worth more than $1 million in the past calendar year.

“These are ongoing contracts,” he told WA Business News.

RAMS is the second whole-of-government application of the BigRedSky software, following the implementation across the Victorian public service in 2001.

“This contract is a whole-of-government contract and provides us with the opportunity to go to any government agency in WA with erecruitment services,” Mr Burnett said.

He said RAMS would provide a single portal for agencies to complete a range of services, including voluntary severance applications, sourcing entry level candidates and placing job advertisements.

The RAMS solution would also provide a centralised Internet-based job board, similar to that provided for the Victorian Government on the web site www.jobs.vic.gov.au

“We believe that the range of services that will be able to be completed through the integrated RAMS system will put the WA public service’s online employment capability ahead of other governments,” Mr Burnett said.

Empired ranked fourth in the 2003 Deloitte Technology Fast50. Mr Burnett and Empired managing director Justin Miller were finalists in the Ernst and Young 2003 Entrepreneur of the Year Awards (Western Region) in the Young Entrepreneur category.