"Brad was front-and-centre of Fisher & Paykel's Covid response," McCrae says.
Porter - McCrae's son-in-law - graduated from Auckland University with a BCom in commercial law and accounting in 2005, worked for KPMG and Collier Capital before joining F&P in 2014.
McCrae says while he's pulling back from the CEO role, he will remain as a director and major shareholder, and keep a hand in product development.
"Orion will be half-time," he says.
While the founder might have a bit more time on his hands, travel was not on the agenda.
"After 30 years of living out of a suitcase, I'd rather have dental surgery," he said.
Full house
Earlier, at Orion's 20th anniversary (the firm was formed in 1993), McCrae recalled some of the hard-scrabble early years - which included renting a basic house in Los Angeles that served as its first US "office".
The crashpad was shared by up to 15, with couches pressed into service as beds, before country manager Paul Viskovich phoned McCrae - back in Auckland at the time - and complained, "I've just done a job interview in my bedroom. It's just not appropriate."
Orion listed on the NZX in 2014 and saw its market cap top $1b as it rode the "Obamacare" boom in the US, which had become its largest market (Viskovich having evidently managed to do a few decent moves in said bedroom).
But things went south as the unexpectedly high cost of moving Orion's systems to the cloud coincided with the healthcare spending winter of the Trump years.
Orion suffered heavy losses and a cash crunch in the two years before it delisted from the NZX in 2019 as McCrae offered to mop up shares for between $1.18 and $1.26 - or around a sixth of their peak - after a series of grim meetings with investors.
Insult was added to injury early in the pandemic as our Ministry of Health snubbed Orion - the incumbent - for a $38m contract to upgrade NZ's vaccination record software, which went without a tender process to multinationals Salesforce, Deloitte and Amazon.
McCrae called the tender process "third-world" but had a complaint to the Auditor-General knocked back.
More recently, Orion has been on the comeback trail.
In June, McCrae said the firm had returned to the black for the second year in a row, which he credited, in part, to more freedom for long-term planning, and more agility, after being freed from the constraints that come with being a public company.
Orion made a profit before short-term incentives of $8m in the 12 months to March 31, 2022 - and that profit after the incentive payments will be similar to last year's $5m, the outgoing CEO said.
Revenue rose 12 per cent to $150m, with 80 per cent coming from overseas.
And two major contract wins had added to its forward bookings:
In April last year, McCrae said his firm had won a multi-year deal to build a patient record system for the US state of Oklahoma, worth a total US$100m ($155m).
And in March this year, McCrae said Orion had won a contract to digitise Saudi Arabia's health records that would be worth "hundreds of millions" to his company over the next decade. The project will create the world's largest health information exchange (HIE), the CEO said.
This afternoon, McCrae said the global HIE market was poised to double from around US$250b to US$500b over the next couple of years.
"We're really well positioned. There's a lot for Brad to get stuck into."
