January 10, 2005
By Nathan Cross, News Ltd, The Advertiser newspaper.
After just two years in business, telephone software development company SkunkWorks Australia counts two major European telcos amongst it's clients and has won a national IT innovations award.
Business partners Bill Oborn and Richard Clarke formed the company at the end of 2002 and after a period developing their Telco Perl software, are ready to sell to the rest of the world.
Skunkworks' Technology Director, Ruchard Clarke, was part of the brains behind former Adelaide based telco Steadycom, which sold for $60 million in 2000.
Mr Clarke and Sales and Marketing Director Bill Oborn are looking at gaining similar success with Skunkworks.
Telco Perl is a software toolkit designed to allow telecommunications providers, systems integrators and corporate and government bodies to build and deploy telephony services.
It's advantage is that clients can add applications to the software themselves becasue it recognises the universal Perl language. This means that they can create unique systems quickly and cheaply.
It enables control of functions such as playing audio messages, sending faxes, setting up conference calls, checking PIN numbers froma database, converting calls into voice over internet protocol, tariffing and billing.
SkunkWorks recently won third place in the 2004 Secrets of Australian IT Innovation competition in the communications application category.
"The award gives us access to funds to help us develop international markets, develop channels to market such as a trade show in the US or Europe or doing sales channel development activity," Oborn said.
Since it's commercial launch in October 2003, Mr Oborn said SkunkWorks has secured two major carriers in Europe as clients, as well as service providers and government bodies in Australia and said there were plans for a new telephony product this year.
"We have just finished building and patenting a product whcih we are now going to take to the top carriers and service providers of the world. We have tested our market in Singpaore and Hawaii and were overwhelmed by the opportunities."