By IAN ROSS
A new alliance with a Mississauga-based software developer could open up new doors to bigger markets for a small northeastern Ontario high-tech firm.
CSDC Systems and Sudbury's Pen Systems announced a strategic partnership in February to share their knowledge of municipal software technologies to pursue what they describe as 'mutually beneficial opportunities' in the North American wireless solutions market.
The two companies hope to integrate CSDC Systems' AMANDA enterprise software with Pen Systems' wireless solutions to go after a bigger share of the municipal government market.
"For us, that means cracking a nut we normally couldn't crack for a long time," says Pen Systems president Nigel Leith.
Since both companies specialize in delivering e-Government software solutions, Leith says the two firms have been "bumping into each other" for years on the trade show circuit. Last May, Pen put out feelers to gauge their competitor's level of interest in a collaboration effort.
CSDC Systems is considered an industry leader in providing e-Government solutions and mobile computing applications for field staff. Their municipal and governmental clients include the City of Greater Toronto; St. Paul, Minn.; San Jose, CA; the Province of Nova Scotia and the State of Wisconsin.
Leith says there are about a half-dozen major software packages on the market used by municipalities and CSDC's AMANDA product consistently occupies the top position in Canada.
"Their client base is larger than ours," says business development manager John Jeza. "They go after larger municipalities we've always been looking for a mechanism to crack. They also found out there was some market opportunities in smaller municipalities, which was our niche."
Leith says CSDC accounts are considered the "crown jewels" of all the large Ontario cities.
Over the years, Pen Systems has diversified from the mining sector into local government and health care, with mobile, wireless applications for field personnel using handheld devices. Their products include Inspector +, their flagship product used for mobile building and fire inspections, bylaw and code enforcement, as well as health evaluations in many small and rural municipalities across North America.
Leith says CSDC Systems delivers an interesting piece of technology best classified as a "meta-database," considered a very flexible leading-edge system which allows a city to make a new department on the fly or make new folders to find new data.
"It's very sexy stuff."
Pen Systems will bring to the table its own Admin middleware system, a data pump that delivers data from computers in the field to their corporate database.
"It turns out these two systems are highly compatible," says Leith, "even though they were developed in completely different lines and backgrounds."
Leith says the combined product offering they can deliver would provide the best expertise in client server database facilities from CSDC and the "best of breed" in mobile wireless from Pen Systems, with their knowledge base and various partnerships.
"It comes down to the intellectual properties of both companies being on the same wavelength."
Leith says CSDC has a smaller version of AMANDA and was looking for the technical expertise to implement it. They decided to partner with Pen Systems rather than outsource the work, given Pen Systems' database structure was so similar and the company had the relevant technical expertise requisite for the project.
Leith says much of Pen Systems' sales come through municipal RFP tendering processes and the alliance should more than triple their access in pre-qualifying for many larger municipal accounts.
"Just the mention of us being associated with CSDC will yield us a lot of credentials."
