Speed tips Turners toward esolutions

The need for a speedy solution was the factor that swung Turners Car Auctions toward esolutions as host for its auction site.

The need for a speedy solution was the factor that swung Turners Car Auctions toward esolutions as host for its auction site.

Turners IT manager Martyn Seddon says Turners also considered Asia Online, but as the company is a Telecom shop and needed the site up as quickly as possible, esolutions won.

The auctioneer is one of year-old esolutions’ 1500 customers, according to channel manager, Sue McCarty.

McCarty last week told Computerworld the Telecom-Microsoft-EDS alliance did business worth $10 million in its first financial year to the end of June. She says it has 12% of its potential market and, while not yet making a profit, should break even next year, she says.

Of its nine offerings, Safecom is by far the biggest earner with 40 customers, including transport company Owens Group, Blue Star, Tip Top and the New Zealand Health Intranet.

Next is e-fax, which is used by The Warehouse, and then dedicated hosting, which counts Turners Car Auctions and the OneZone online market among its customers. Turners went to esolutions for the infrastructure to its in-house-developed closed tender auction application , for which security was a major requirement. The site, which went live last October, was up within a week, says Seddon.

With dedicated hosting it gets a 10Mbit/s, firewall-protected connection via Telecom’s internet backbone and 24x7 maintenance of its server in an EDS data centre.

At the end of its first year, esolutions has laid off about half a dozen staff, hiring the same number of channel specialists. That brings the headcount to 65.

It is pitching itself as a provider of e-commerce infrastructure. Its ASP offering of eOffice and NettPay has had limited uptake.

It is launching new products including InfoXchange, an XML-based messaging hub, Secure Key, a PKI based authentication product, and Flexibill. Flexibill, which allows customers to pay bills to participating organisations, will compete with NZ Post’s eBill. Telecom will be the first biller to come online in October.