Performix nets European deal

Dublin technology company Performix has signed a large-scale, panEuropean deal with giant Internet service provider AOL Europe today that it hopes will help push it to the forefront of the call centre application market. The deal will place Performix's software, which helps call centre employees monitor and improve their own performance, into six AOL Europe call centres across four countries. Over the next 12 months, 2,500 call centre agents in the Republic, Britain, Germany and France will start using the program, beginning with employees in Waterford this month and Bristol next month. According to founder and chief executive Mr Cathal McGloin, Performix intends to grow fast and position itself aggressively in the US market. "We have about another 12 months to establish ourselves globally as the number one company in this area," he says.

US analyst Datamonitor gave the product a thumbs-up recently, which should help. Both Mr McGloin and chief financial officer Mr Conor Sheahan are confident they have first-mover advantage with a product they say has not been duplicated elsewhere and that they see as ideal for the enormous US call centre market, predicted to be worth $40 billion by 2003. But that means further fundraising to enable Performix to acquire other companies in complementary product niches. The two-year-old company, valued at $30 million following a recent "angel" or initial round of fund-raising worth $8 million, intends to begin another $15 to $20 million funding round immediately, preferably to take on a major US partner to help open doors on the other side of the Atlantic.

The company has already grown from 30 to 90 employees since January and expanded to four offices - in Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh and Cheshire. Mr McGloin is busy packing in preparation for a permanent move to a new US office in Boston.

All of which sounds exhaustingly energetic and serious. But over big plates of burgers, sandwiches and chips in a Dublin restaurant, the two men are relaxed and jovial and full of opinions on the Irish technology scene, the availability of venture capital, the American way of doing business and the future success of their product, called Acumen Performance Manager.

And they're full of admiration for Baltimore Technology's fast-track path to prominence, expressing every intention of mirroring the company's success to become one of the top tier Irish technology companies themselves.

They see plenty of opportunity in the US for an application already used by Unisys, Esat Digifone and Conduit Europe to boost call centre employee productivity by letting workers see how close they are to achieving the performance awards typically offered as productivity enticements. "They're more ready for it. Their whole ethos (in America) is customer service," says Mr McGloin. The widespread use of corporate websites in the US, and the integration of call centres with the sites as a customer service tool, leads Performix to believe the US will be its primary market.

"Ultimately, the States is where it's going to happen," says Mr Sheahan. Already, they say, Americans are rebranding call centres as "e-centres" to get away from the 1980s and 1990s image of banks of telephone workers, and they note that American venture firms have said not to use the term "call centre" at all when approaching the market. "Every online business now has a call centre, which will increasingly link online communications tools such as chat and online telephony with a real person in a call centre," says Mr McGloinn. "The call centre and the Web are just going to merge."

This reverses predictions a few years ago that call centres would vanish as the web began to dominate as a tool for commerce. But Mr Sheahan says that the major frustration expressed by consumers last Christmas - considered to be the first time significant numbers went to the Net for gift purchases - was retailers' inability to handle customer service problems.

While they say their only serious challenge now is to oust inhouse software programs already developed by prospective customers to handle call centre productivity, they know competition will come sooner rather than later. "There'll be other people in this space. You no longer have seven years to grow a company. You have three, max," says Mr McGloin. As Performix enters that crucial third year, it'll be driving hard for funding and global reach. "To make it in the really big playing fields, we need more than $5 to $6 million in the war chest," says Mr Sheahan.

They figure 20 per cent of their existing funding will go on infrastructure alone. New funds will go towards acquisitions "to gain complementary products, anything that fits with what we have, such as a start-up that has something that we couldn't build ourselves in three to six months," he says.

And they're upbeat about Irish capability to take on the global market. "Technology that comes out of Ireland is every bit as good - or as bad - as that in the US. But they have the vision," says Mr McGloin, pointing out a key reason why he thinks US companies dominate internationally in the tech sector. "Success that comes in this area in Ireland comes from people who have this global vision and act accordingly."