We were lucky enough to be chosen to present at the inaugural Tech23 event held in Sydney yesterday. Geoff took to the stage during the enterprise section of the day, with a focus on why running a professional service business sucks so much, and how our Affinity product helps to solve the problems created by manual processes, spreadsheets and managing by crisis.

The feedback from the Enterprise panel of experts was broadly supportive, with a question from the founder of TOWER Software about the appropriateness and validity of our SaaS offering, compared to the traditional approach of building, perpetually licencing, and making money off services. While this approach certainly has cash flow benefits and suits the bigger enterprise and government markets (the types that TOWER has a big footprint in) very well, we’re focusing more on the 5-50 employees SME space for our offering, a sector that values cost effectiveness and capital restraint more highly.

Our panel also had a challenge from a member of the audience – specifically in response to our provocative “Technology has left professional services behind” argument – that basically called us out as being ignorant or deliberately lying, which certainly spiced things up a bit. Unfortunately, the 4 minute limit on presentations – which is a great idea – meant we were limited to making fairly high level, general statements when describing the problems experienced by our sector. More time would have allowed for a more nuanced presentation and more specifics, but the thing we really want to emphasise is that our target market (size and industry) is predominantly still using a mixture of unintegrated point software, home grown spreadsheets and lots of meetings to manage their workloads and businesses. Even though there are other technology solutions out there, they haven’t achieved the commonplace, “you need to have this to succeed” levels of adoption that you see in other types of businesses such as manufacturing, logistics and so forth, and this is something we think we can achieve.

A big thanks to Rachel Slattery and her team at SlatteryIT for a fantastic and almost flawless  inaugural event (WiFi is any events Achilles Heel), and especially for selecting such high powered panelists. A big thankyou to the high-powered panelists who gave their time and their excellent advice, and finally a big thankyou to the NSW Department of Industry and Investment and the Australian Technology Showcase for making it possible.