SourceCode eyes .NET workflow sales

US-based developer SourceCode has opened an office in Sydney to serve the expanding market for its .NET-based edge workflow software in Australia and New Zealand.

Herman Taljaard, managing director for SourceCode ANZ, said the ISV had launched a separate Australasian operation based in the northern Sydney suburb of Chatswood.

Awareness of the benefits of workflow solutions was growing in Australasia and local opportunities for its edge workflow platform K2.net were multiplying, he said.

"We've been involved in Australasia for about two years now and managed the region as part of our Asia-Pacific operation out of Singapore and we've started getting more actively involved in Australia," Taljaard said.

"We were really starting to get traction [here] in the second quarter [of 2005]."

Taljaard said the opportunities were being driven by changing business requirements around the globe, but especially in English-speaking nations such as Australia.

"Managing that out of Singapore got a bit more complex," he said. "Partners we've started working with have started to build some traction [here] as well."

Dennis Parker, UK-based commercial operations manager for SourceCode outside North America,said English-speaking countries in general were focusing strongly on automation and compliance.

"With Australia, definitely, it fell into that mould," he said.

Further, it was getting increasingly important to support its K2.net sales locally, Parker said.

Taljaard said SourceCode's single product, single platform focus had helped it build confidence in partners and customers around the world.

"We haven't diluted our focus. We do K2 Workflow on the .NET platform and
that's it," he said.

K2.net had appeal for businesses of all sizes with mission-critical business processes and "non-essential" processes, such as staff leave applications, that could benefit from being managed in a more centralised, consistent and efficient manner, he said.

"[For instance] leave applications, it's really taking that and putting automation processes around that," Taljaard said. "You can see where it is in the processes. You can do business activity monitoring and business process tracking."

K2.net complemented applications such as Microsoft BizTalk Server, SharePoint Portal Server and InfoPath. Customers using Microsoft Office System could use it to add ad hoc and enterprise-wide workflow solutions that were repeatable and predictable, he said.

The solution had five components: drag-and-drop workflow design, server software for handling myriad transactions, an environment for tracking and managing work, workflow authoring wizards and a set of Microsoft ASP.NET form and user interface controls for building workflow-enabled, web-accessible forms.

So far, K2.net had about 10 clients in Australia. "Our route to market is through system integrator partners. They sell licences on to our clients and then provide implementation."

Parker said a good example of where K2.net was useful was in online banking. Businesses such as finance organisations often had web forms online for customer complaints. But they were rarely monitored and few organisations had been able to respond in a timely and efficient manner to complaints submitted via web forms.

That needn't be the case, he said.

"The technology to do this has been around for quite a while, so why hasn't it happened? And we think we have a proposition that will actually make it happen," Parker said.

Fleur Doidge attended the Tech.Ed conference on the Gold Coast as a guest of
Microsoft.

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