KIWI COMPANIES GOING GLOBAL

A couple of stories of mine published in the Herald this week about kiwi companies that are undertaking aggressive global expansion plans.

I visited Andrew Cardno at Compudigm in January when I was on the way to the CES show. His company is really going places after Andrew and his co-founders putting in ten years of solid work. It looks like the toil will soon pay off for them. Compudigm is the darling of the data visualisation industry in the US, when they have all the major casinos as clients. Now Compudigm is pushing into Europe and Asia, when Macau is now as big a gambling destination as Las Vegas. You can read the story on Compudigm here. Nice to see that Andrew is committed to keeping development in Wellington too.

Another company gearing up for global expansion is Healthphone, which has just brought on a senior Microsoft executive to head the company from a new headquarters in Seattle, a stone's throw from Microsoft's campus. Healthphone has completely aligned itself with Microsoft's health software platform and strategy, a move that carries a certain amount of risk. But Microsoft's strength in this space and in the Windows Mobile platform which Healthpohne emplys to get health data out to PDAs and smartphones, means the deal looks like having major advantages for Healthphone. As this interview with new CEO Debbi Gillotti and president Matt Hector-Taylor shows, the company is in a new phase of expansion, opening offices all over the world. Of particular interest are the programmes Healthphone is involved in to get health services out to consumers via text messages and the internet. This is an immature market that has a great deal of potential.