Published on the 01/09/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
IT systems management company LANDESK has bought Melbourne’s Xtraction Solutions for its digital dashboards that present IT systems data in an easy to understand format…
Used by Australian companies including Westfield, NAB, Cochlear and Toll, Xtraction takes data from various systems and displays it in a dashboard format that it says allows non-technical users to visualise the way their IT systems are operating, allowing them to respond appropriately. Headquartered in Australia, Xtraction has operations in the US and South Africa and 308 customers worldwide.
CEO Clive Smith said the team of 12 people would all be offered roles in LANDESK, and that development of the Xtraction technology would remain in Australia.
LANDESK is pinning its hopes on these sorts of dashboards going mainstream. It cites a May 2015 report from Gartner that indicated that although fewer than 10 percent of organisations currently use such dashboards that will rise to more than 50 percent by 2020.
For LANDESK this is the latest in a series of five takeovers to flesh out the product portfolio. Steve Daly, chief executive officer told iStart that buying technology rather than building solutions itself allowed LANDESK to get products to market quicker.
He said that users of its IT service management systems had regularly requested a dashboard style tool that allowed them to visualise how their systems were performing.
However Daly said that even more important than the IP associated with the Xtraction software was the access to specialist skills that the takeover delivered.
“All software is copyable. There is no sustainable competitive advantage from software. The sustainable competitive advantage is the knowledge of the people,” said Daly.
He declined to say how much LANDESK, which has revenues of around $US250 million dollars, had paid for the Melbourne company but he said it would be a “cornerstone of the workspaces initiative.”
