US focus fits for SigPoint

THE work of a small Perth software developer SigPoint Pty Ltd is being recognised by the movers and shakers of California’s Silicon Valley.

The company, which is housed at Bentley’s Technology Park, was recently nominated for a Tech Museum Award in the Environment category.

A museum located in the city of San Jose, the Tech is devoted to displays of technology developments.

Its awards honour companies from around the world that develop or apply technology to solve global challenges. The technology must significantly improve the human condition in one of the five areas of health, education, environment, economic development and equality.

SigPoint CEO Lou Schillaci said the company’s nomination for the award was made even more special by the fact that the Tech had approached SigPoint, having heard about its software.

“They found out about what we were doing and said: ‘We want you to enter this category’,” Mr Schillaci said.

The company has been working on its software, called SigPoint NDT, for about two years. (SigPoint is shorthand for signature point referencing, which is the type of testing the software executes, and NDT stands for non-destructive testing.)

The program is used to monitor the condition of industrial plants and alert companies to when their plants need to be shut down for maintenance. It reduces the number of monitoring measurements companies must take manually, and artificially produces the rest.

According to Mr Schillaci, if a company was measuring a million different points each year, the software would reduce that number to just 1,000 points.

“Most people in large industry though, rather than just saving money by reducing the expense of testing, are actually testing more of the plant,” Mr Schillaci said.

“Firstly, they’ve got a better handle on what the plant’s state is; secondly, they know when they have to shut it down for a bit of maintenance because the program tells them in advance, and thirdly, they don’t have to worry about environmental issues because they’ve got them controlled by virtue of the first two.”

SigPoint struck deals with Alcoa and Shell in the United States 18 months ago for those companies to use the program at some of their operations, and had saved the multinationals hundreds of thousands of dollars in the time since, Mr Schillaci said. The company has also formed an alliance with technology giants Sun Microsystems and AGFA to create world standards for NDT.

SigPoint is focusing almost entirely on the US market for its software, which explains the Tech’s awareness of a small Perth company with six employees. The company is currently seeking ‘kicker equity’ of between $500,000 and $1 million from Australian investors so it can pursue a larger capital raising of up to $US4 million in the US.

“We want to stay pretty much as a private company; the market’s no good for IPOs at the moment,” Mr Schillaci said.

“We’ve already developed this application and the software, so we don’t need a lot of money.

“We’re going to be able to capture some of the market a lot faster than other companies could.”

Finalists from each of the five categories in the Tech Awards will be announced in the US on September 25 2002 and the winners will be awarded $US50,000 on November 7 2002.