TVD making headway in America

By ADAM GIFFORD

Auckland software company Telephony Video Data (TVD) is attacking the North American market after almost saturating the New Zealand market with its call centre product for power utilities.

Southland power network management company PowerNet has just installed the latest version of TVD's Avalanche fault call management and Consumer Call Centre software, including a new Wireless Dispatch module that allows contractors to get service requests on integrated QTEK 1010 Windows CE phones.

TVD chief executive Andrew Thompson said utilities covering 73 per cent of New Zealand's power consumers used Avalanche.

It has five customers in Canada and has just opened an office in Denver, Colorado.

"After September 11 and the uncertain nature of the market, we thought if there was ever a time to go hard in the US it was then because everyone else was taking the pedal off the metal," Thompson said.

The company got venture funding from Emerald Capital, a Canadian fund with other New Zealand ties, and started wearing out the shoe leather.

"We are going through the pain of spending US$1 million and we are starting to see sales coming through.

"In a conservative market like the utilities sector, you have to be immersed in market before people notice. You can't just go up with a killer application. People say, 'Will you be here in a year's time?"'

TVD has just installed its first US site, a 45,000-customer co-operative in Washington state, and believes it is close to signing a Texas utility.

"There are about 3000 power companies in the US, but only about 300 have more than 100,000 customers - the bulk of them are co-operatives or what they call munis with 1000 to 35,000 customers," Thompson said.

"We believe we have the mix right to succeed. We have a good product we can deliver quickly at a price point our competitors can't match."

TVD's software allows utilities to bring together data they need to manage faults in their networks.

Before deregulation much of this information was held within single organisations, but now it can be spread across multiple companies, all of whom have a stake in getting faults fixed quickly.

Avalanche screens incoming calls and, if they come from an area with a known outage, plays a message informing the caller what caused the outage and when it will be fixed.

Most callers end the call there without going through to a human operator.

PowerNet chief executive Martin Walton said Avalanche, which cost the Invercargill company about $200,000 to install, was saving money and improving service.

"When we were operating with a manual system, we had to bring extra people in when there was a storm and even then we were concerned customers were left on the phone waiting for an answer," Walton said.

"For the last two major storms we have cut the number of calls staff have to deal with by more than 75 per cent, and we haven't needed to man the storm gallery."

Walton said the new fault and maintenance dispatch system would allow more efficient exchange of work orders and status updates with contractors.

"All our maintenance is outsourced so we need a system which can monitor the performance of suppliers," Walton said.

TVD