Keys to Innovation

Better than Science Fiction

If there’s one industry that needs to be constantly innovating and moving a step ahead of the marketplace, it’s ICT. And one player that has been making all the right moves is Holly Connects.

Holly gets its name from a sci-fi television show, Red Dwarf, and its success to date is a little out of this world, too. The company’s commitment to innovation, research and development and a solid company culture has seen it win major contracts with big-name telcos—not bad for a small player competing for a stake in the growing global ‘next generation interactive voice response market’.

The Sydney-based company formed in 2000 by a small group of programmers who developed OzEmails’s voice over internet protocol (VoIP) business between 1996 and 1999. Now with 35 staff, the team saw a gap in the market for combining the benefits of VoIP with speech recognition technology, and embarked on a four-year research and development project to create the Holly Voice Platform.

The platform, which uses VoiceXML software, is an interactive voice response system that understands whole sentences and enables complex data to be read over the telephone.

It is aimed at big and small organisations, and can be used within a client’s existing IT infrastructure.

One advantage of the software is that when a customer calls a business they can be automatically validated while saying their telephone number, rather than having to quote other security details to log in.

Non-executive chairman, David Shein, says Holly’s success is because of its exceptional development team, the company’s culture and early support for its research from the AusIndustry’s R&D Tax Concession. "Our ‘can do’ culture meant that we were able to meet our early vision for where we wanted to be," Shein says.

And the R&D concession made a huge difference. "The Concession meant that in our early days we could afford to take on extra programmers.

"Many small companies struggle in the early days because they can’t take on the necessary resources to get their product to market on time."

Holly now boasts customers such as Telstra, Vodafone, Powertel, Optus and Unwired. And winning the Telstra contract really put them on the map. "Telstra took a chance with us because we were only a fledgling company,” he says. "It was a massive achievement to win a contract with the 13th biggest telecommunications carrier in the world.

"Telstra pushed us to improve our testing and quality and gave us a lot of good advice about what we needed to do to compete globally."

In addition to using Holly for its own internal applications, Holly has licensed its technology to Telstra, which is now selling the service to its business and government customers as a hosted service.

Holly Australia recently appointed a sales director in the United States and relocated an existing top sales executive to head the European market.

In 2006, the company had a 33 percent share of the VoiceXML interactive voice response market in Australia.

Shein says Holly’s focus on starting out big by aiming at large carriers and enterprises has paid off because it has been easy for the company to scale down its technology to suit smaller companies. "The key to our success is having a great team in Australia, along with support from the government," he says. "That has helped us become a successful, innovative Australian company."

—AusIndustry