By ADAM GIFFORD
New Zealand software firm WEL Technology has made its first United States sale, selling its PV2 power billing software to Iowa-based MidAmerican Energy Company, owned by billionaire Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway fund.
WEL Technology chief executive Gavin Mitchell said that while the sale was worth only about $US320,000 for
the software and a further $US50,000 for related services, it was a valuable first step into the market.
"It will give us a good profile. MidAmerican is a medium-sized energy company which is growing aggressively, backed by Berkshire Hathaway, which gives it good profile in the financial markets," he said.
While MidAmerican has its headquarters in Des Moines, it intends to wholesale power into the deregulating markets in Ohio, Illinois and Texas.
"The key thing for them was we were coming from a marketplace which was already deregulated, with a product which has grown and proved itself in a deregulated market," Mr Mitchell said.
PV2 is used by power companies to do complex billing of large customers.
"It sits alongside the CIS [customer information systems] billing systems used to bill residential customers.
MidAmerican has bought a CIS billing system from another New Zealand company, Peace Computers.
Mr Mitchell said WEL Technology and Peace were not aware they had both been bidding for parts of the same business.
Work has already started on implementing the system, which should be complete by Christmas.
However, the system would not go live until at least February because of a timetable slippage in the Peace CIS implementation.
WEL Technology, which started within Waikato Energy but is now a wholly owned subsidiary of listed software investor Spectrum Resources, has about 60 customers for PV2 in Ontario, Canada.
WEL Technology also has eight New Zealand sites, including Contact, NGC, Genesis and WEL Energy, giving it 70 per cent of the complex billing market here.
Mr Mitchell said it was recruiting a business development manager for North America.
It was also looking to add staff to its 10-strong development team.
PV2 runs on a Windows client linked to an Oracle database.
It stores, manage and aggregates energy consumption, pricing and network information.
It can also do contract management, billing, reconciliation and consumption analyses.
MidAmerican's vice-president of customer choice, Annette Johnston, said PV2 stood out from North American competitors because of its sophistication, ease of use and applicability to deregulated markets.
