Holliday Group Bowled Over With Award Honours

Holliday
Group Limited

Media release
30-Oct-00

HOLLIDAY GROUP BOWLED OVER WITH AWARD HONOURS

At the Hi Tech Excellence Awards 2000 held in Auckland on Saturday entrepreneurial Christchurch software development company the Holliday Group stole the limelight by winning two awards and one highly commended.

Of the nine award categories the Holliday group walked away with three honours. They won the Hi Tech Quality Award and was highly commended in the Software Excellence Award. The icing on the cake was provided by prized Holliday employee Matt Barker who won the Outstanding New Talent Award.

News of the awards compliments very exciting times for staff at The Holliday Group. The company is celebrating its tenth birthday next month and, with an avalanche of national and international orders for mobile communcations solutions, staff are literally bowled over with the enormous attention the company is receiving.

Holliday Group Ltd is at the forefront of the mobile wireless technology industry. They specialise in the development of mobile workforce systems that enhance the effectiveness of field-based staff by enabling remote access to, and collection of, data. With expertise in wireless data and Palm technology, the Holliday Group have extended their product offering to include their own Jade-built Communication Server that links back-end systems to the mobile environment.

This HGL Communications Server introduces a new level of capability for wireless hand held systems and is the product that won the company highly commended honours for the Software Excellence Award.

Summarising Holliday’s Quality Award entry, Hi Tech judges said “Holliday Group have a clear understanding of the meaning and purpose of quality systems – “Client Satisfaction”. They have built an infrastructure that captures every aspect of their business that relates to the deliverable. Not only do they manage their own quality system, but ensure their customers’ systems are developed sufficiently to make good the product introduction.”

“Holliday Group demonstrate efficiency, accessibility, paperless, company-wide. Communication is King. Understanding their clients’ business and ensuring that customers know what is happening with time and cost budgets means happy endings. Holliday Group have perfected the art of service in a very demanding industry Sector.”

Phil Holliday, the company’s founder and managing director says, “Quality is not about systems. It is about people. Giving people the best tools helps them to do the best job. So when we started on this quality journey nearly ten years ago it was with a view to providing a better way of working than any of us had seen before. And we felt that we did this.”

“But, and I say this on behalf of all the employees at Holliday Group Ltd, we are ordinary people. We make mistakes. We don’t always do what we say we do. Sometimes we struggle, and sometimes we just plain get it wrong. But we do learn from our mistakes. We want to improve. We believe that ordinary people can produce extraordinary results. We do have a passion for quality.”

“We consider it a huge privilege to win the ‘Hi Tech Quality Award’. To be judged by our peers in this way is outstanding. But I doubt if the people who make up Holliday Group will ever be truly happy with the company’s ‘quality’, always knowing that we can do better. The challenge for us is to keep improving.”

By winning the Outstanding New Talent Award, Matt Barker of the Holliday Group couldn’t have capped off a better night for the company. The judges reportedly had extreme difficulty in selecting a winner from the three finalists but in the end agreed that Matt Barker of the Holliday Group “encompassed the greatest range of accomplishments that qualified him to be the winner of the Outstanding New Talent Award. A US client for whom Holliday supply their recently release B2B wireless communication software said his response to their need was nothing short of ‘fantastic’.”

At just 22 years of age “Matt’s range of skills and ability to manage the project reflects the depth of capability of young kiwi innovators,” said one of the judges. “His ability to improve the performance of the Palm operating system by more than 500 per cent is truly outstanding,” said another.
Phil Holliday has this to say of his star achiever, “One of Matt’s strengths is his ability to become extremely proficient in new environments in very little time. He has never required supervision or more than a limited introduction to a new technology, this is especially true of the wireless environment, which has proven to be a difficult area for many people. He develops skills beyond those required to produce a satisfactory application and extends them to include an intimate understanding of the underlying hardware and operating system architecture.”

“Matt is an exceptional young software engineer. He has rapidly understood the business issues that face a small company such as Holliday Group, particularly the need to deliver on time, to budget and to manage the client interface. He consistently works to ensure that through his and the team's effort these business goals are met. At Holliday Group we allow employees to have as much responsibility in other areas of the business as they want. Matt has taken up the challenge and delivered.”

- Ends -

About the Holliday Group

The Holliday Group is the largest Palm application provider in Australasia and one of the top 100 Palm application developers in the world. The company excels in the provision of innovative mobile communication solutions on the Palm computing platform. It is also one of the few companies that delivers WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) Applications in Australia and New Zealand. WAP technology enables access to the Internet on new the generation of cellular phones.

From its head-office in Christchurch, the company develops a wide range of custom software solutions that streamlines time-to-market production and minimises administrative costs. The Holliday Group's expertise spans development of custom made Microsoft OS desktop applications, Internet Web authoring, man-machine interfaces to back office systems, communications and remote control systems.

For further information and/or photography please contact:

Dave Ffowcs Williams Shelley Grell
Business Development Director PR Director
The Holliday Group Communicate IT Ltd
Tel: + 64 (0)3 365 4120 Tel/Fax: + 64 (0)3 314 4606
Email: davefw@holliday.co.nz Mobile: 025 260 2635
Web: www.hqzone.co.nz Email: communicateit@xtra.co.nz

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