Significant investment announced for Author-it

Media Release 27April 2009

Significant investment announced for Author-it

One man’s solution to the frustrating job of cutting and pasting or retrieving written information to reuse across a myriad of different business documents is landing a New Zealand company thousands of major international clients, along with lucrative export dollars.

The achievements of Author-it, developed by Aucklander Paul Trotter, are being acknowledged with investment of $870,000 from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology to help the company create even greater export success.

The investment is through the Foundation’s business investment programme, TechNZ, and will be matched dollar-for-dollar by Author-it to help build new features for its enterprise authoring and content management software that is already used by more than 3,500 clients internationally.

Foundation Business Manager Craig Adams says a key factor in approving the investment is Author-it’s success in making significant overseas sales.

“Many companies struggle to cross that chasm from attracting early adopters to making real deals in a highly competitive commercial market.

“Author-it is already doing that and setting an excellent global benchmark for a New Zealand software company,” says Mr Adams.

Author-it does for documentation what financial applications do for accounting. Instead of storing documents as files, Author-it saves written content as chunks of information and stores these in a relational database. Each piece or topic may contain a paragraph or two of text, graphics, tables and links. By storing content in this way, it can be easily reused in multiple documents, ensuring greater accuracy and consistency.

When content needs to be updated, the change will be made automatically wherever that content is reused. This saves significant costs, particularly for companies exporting to global markets. By efficient reuse of content, Author-it reduces the cost of translating documents to other languages by more than 50 per cent.

In 1995, Author-it creator Paul Trotter worked as a technical writer and was asked to convert a written manual to a help desk system. He became frustrated with the cut-and-paste process so began devising a better system on a computer in his spare bedroom.

He attracted a small investor and went on the road for four years developing international markets. The company contracted reseller channels which helped it grow in targeted global markets and in 2003, it began setting up its own direct sales team. It has recently established sales and service teams in the United States.

Company President Steve Davis says Author-it has grown its business from one product for small desk top use to an enterprise level solution for hundreds or even thousands of users.

The TechNZ investment will take the Author-it software to a unique level. The investment will support the development of ‘Author-it Aspect’ which is a web application that dynamically compiles information on the fly and only delivers content relevant to the reader via a web browser.

“Often there is so much content in documentation that it is hard to find what is relevant to the individual. Take a dress code in a company’s policy and procedure manual as an example. Author-it Aspect will distinguish and display the dress code policy specific to your location, be it London or Bermuda,” says Mr Davis.

“The investment means we can concentrate more fully on our latest innovation, develop a product that is likely to be better than if we were depending entirely on our own resources, get to market more quickly and earn valuable export income sooner.”

Mr Davis says it takes a company such as Author-it significant resources to maintain existing products so investment in research and development from TechNZ is critical.

“In the IT sector, if you stand still you eventually die so we need to consistently improve and be constantly looking at innovation – it’s only through innovation you get high growth,” he says.

TechNZ also provided approximately $240,000 in 2002 for Author-it’s research and development, an investment that Mr Davis says underpins a significant amount of company growth and has been instrumental in building a product that is responsible for about half its client base.

ENDS

About the Foundation:
The Foundation for Research, Science and Technology invests over $530 million a year on behalf of the New Zealand Government in research and development to enhance the wealth and well being of New Zealanders. TechNZ is the Foundation’s business investment programme. It puts $50 million a year into research and development by New Zealand companies, targeting key sectors of the economy with strong growth potential including specialised manufacturing, information technology, biotechnology and food and beverages.

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