11 July 2000
QUEEN Street in Melbourne is hardly a replica of Silicon Valley, but it was to that unlikely grey thoroughfare that the giant British building society the Woolwich, one of Europe's largest mortgage lenders, came last month seeking software. It wanted an interactive website and wanted it built within a fortnight. A serious competitor was about to go online and Woolwich wanted to be first.
It was a $1 million job and it was completed within two weeks by the 11-person staff of Mainstream Computing, run by Dr Mark Blakey.
"They had a very demanding requirement," Blakey says. ``They came to us only about two weeks before launch date and they wanted to do a big-bang implementation. The reason we were able to handle the task was that we have a very modular, toolkit-based approach to building tools such as this. So we were able to create something new and put it together and customise it to their requirements in such a ridiculously short time-frame.
"This is a major coup for us. We are very excited about it and we are going straight back to the UK with a view to opening up a sales office there to beef up our representation on the ground there. Development will still be done in Melbourne, but this is looking like a nice little Australian export business."
Blakey says his firm was one of a number approached by the Woolwich.
``That's why we feel so good about winning the job," he says. ``When the chips were down, they found the only way they could meet their deadline was to come to a small Melbourne software house. With a deadline of only two weeks, most companies would only be getting the specifications together.
``Our differentiator is not only the speed of our response but the specifications of our tools. We have drag-along sliders instead of type-in commands. The quality of the graphical output is good. It all happens on your computer instead of having to wait for a server to do something.
``It is telling people what they want to know. (It is) designed to communicate how financial products work and give meaningful outcomes the ordinary house buyer can understand.
``We have a 10-by-10 rule," Blakey says. ``If the product can't be used by a 10-year-old in 10 minutes, it isn't right. I have tried this out on my 10-year-old daughter and she could use it almost instantly. It really is that accessible."
The Woolwich deal was negotiated, the work was done and Mainstream was paid, all within two weeks. ``It was a pretty busy little period," says Blakey, a large and amiable man who tends towards understatement.
But how did Woolwich, a huge financial organisation on the other side of the planet, find a tiny website developer in Melbourne? And was the request left so late?
``We have been building a presence in the UK for about five years now," Blakey says. ``Our sales manager makes occasional trips there and we had previously done work for Abbey National, one of the largest banking organisations in the UK. We had been in touch with Woolwich but they had always said they weren't ready for this kind of technology."
Then, Blakey says, the British banker discovered that a principal competitor was about to launch on the Internet an interactive mortgage planning and buying system that posed a serious threat to the Woolwich's business. The competitor was to launch in July. Woolwich decided it had to go public on June 1, less than three weeks from the date its managing director decided the company was going to be first to market.
``They rang us up, told us what they wanted and asked if it were possible," Blakey says. ``It was. It was done and delivered on the due date and they had it in production on June 1.
``It wasn't just a question of writing the thing and delivering it, which was hard enough in itself, but after we had started, they rang up and said, `Oh, by the way, you have to port it to OS/2 as well'. Woolwich still uses IBMs OS/2 Warp as its operating system. We thought that Java would run on it, so we said we would do it.
``One of the things we strove to do when we created the underlying tools of our product was to come up with something that made it easy to port to different environments. It worked beautifully. Within a day we had it working on OS/2."
The website Mainstream developed for Woolwich is now running on the Web at www.woolwich.co.uk, or users can go direct to the financial planning tool at www.openplan.co.uk It is highly interactive and, says Blakey, ``there is nothing else like it and Woolwich now has it running at all levels of its operation."
Mainstream's Australian clients include Business Review Weekly and Investor Weekly magazines, ninemsn.com.au, Seek.com.au and a variety of similar companies. In Britain, its clients include Abbey National, National Australia Group Europe and www.infonline.co.uk, a British brokerage group.