I've been following Wellington IT entrepreneur Rod Drury's blog posts (www.drury.net.nz) about his trip to Wales to compete against other tech start-ups from around the world in the International Technium Challenge, so it was good to learn this afternoon that he'd won the thing.
It's a bitof a coup for Drury and his web start-up Xero as it comes with $120,000 worth of business support services and wins Xero office space in a Welsh tech incubator. The judges obviously liked the Xero business model which delivers accounting software via the internet on a subsciption basis. The fact that Xero is looking to open up shop in the United Kingdom also helped greatly.
The Welsh have been pretty proactive in the last few years about trying to attract IT businesses to their neck of the woods. Their pitch, when I last met up with the Welsh Development Agency (www.nzherald.co.nz) is that by locating in Wales, hi-tech companies can avoid the high overheads of basing themselves in large English cities, but still be a short drive from London.
"There's this area situated along the M4 corridor between Swansea in Wales and London which contains 40 per cent of all electronics companies in the UK. The likes of Cisco, Alcatel and Oracle are all there," the WDA's Asia-Pacific boss Andre Davis told me.
Panztel (www.panztel.com) is one such New Zealand IT company that used the WDA's support to set up an operation in Wales. They've been there for around five years now.
