Mark Loveys. Photo / Dean Purcell

Mark Loveys. Photo / Dean Purcell

I've been writing a lot about clouds in recent months, and each time think, "Am I thrashing this?"

Then I meet up with Mark Loveys, and realise there is still much to be said about what is becoming a huge shift in the way people work and interact with the digital environment.

Loveys is the guy who wrote an internal accounting system for personal computer assembler PC Direct which became exo-net.

Early in the long saga that led to exo-net being part of the MYOB stable, Loveys struck off on his own with Enprise, which installed exo-net into other mid-sized businesses.

Spotting that many of his customers bought exo-net because of the nifty job costing module Enprise had written for it, Loveys wrote a similar module for the Business One product German software giant SAP developed for small and medium organisations.

That took off, giving Enprise an international reach which attracted the attention of TMT Ventures.

In 2006 TMT invested $2 million in Enprise and merged it with another firm in its portfolio which was struggling for traction.

Then almost 10 years old, EMS Cortex had developed software which allowed application hosting companies to provision their customers: add new users, manage passwords and consents, add new applications and modules through a single browser interface.

That makes Loveys well placed to track the growth of cloud computing.

He's just been on a multi-city trip through North America talking to partners, customers and competitors.

"We're struggling to keep up with demand to provide infrastructure to cloud providers. We're a hands-on company, so we bring on about five customers a month," Loveys says.

In the main that's done over the internet from EMS-Cortex's Avondale headquarters.

The company is looking for implementation partners to cope with the scale of growth it is contemplating.

Lovey's trip included finalising a strategic partnership agreement with implement.com, a Seattle-based systems integrator that works closely with Microsoft to build cloud infrastructure for hosted service providers and telecommunications companies.

The implement.com deal comes hard on the heels of global IT services company Unisys Corporation including the Cortex control panel in its new Unified Communication as a service cloud offering.