Australian technology company Aconex is truly a global operation. Its document management system is used across $250 billion of projects across 66 countries. Aconex has offices in 37 countries around the world, from south east Asia to eastern Europe. Its website has been translated into eight languages. Its major shareholder is a US private equity firm and its fastest-growing market is the Middle East.
“We always saw it as a global business,” co-founder Leigh Jasper says. “It just happened to start in Australia.”
The global nature of Aconex’s business is not just a happy accident. The company has been careful to ensure everything from its technology platform to its customer support systems and its website have been designed with multiple markets in mind. In the past two years, average annual revenue growth has been 88%, with revenue hitting $42 million in 2007-08. Well over half of the company’s sales are made offshore.
Aconex was founded in 2000 with the aim of finding a solution to controlling the large, complex flow of information on construction and engineering projects. Traditionally, communication on a construction project was paper-based, with even a medium-sized project resulting in thousands of documents being created and exchanged. As well as being time-consuming and expensive, it left companies open to risks such as losing information.
So Jasper and co-founder Robert Phillpot created a web-based system called Aconex (an acronym of Australian Construction Exchange) for managing documentation and correspondence. The system allows people working on a project (such as project managers, contractors, architects and consultants) to view, track and share their data electronically in real-time, from any location.
Almost from day one, Jasper and Phillpot realised their system would translate easily to foreign markets. “Perhaps we were suitability naive, but we were never daunted by doing business in North America or the Middle East or Asia,” Jasper says.
The company started expanding offshore using a simple approach. An Aconex team member does market research on a new country and holds meetings with potential clients and builders, then an in-country salesperson is appointed, who works form a home office or serviced apartment. Once the sale is secured, an office is set up.
Jasper says the company’s global reach has become one of its biggest advantages. Big construction projects are being increasingly globalised – an apartment tower might have an architect from Dubai, an engineer from India and a construction manager based in the US. Web-based collaboration tools are crucial, but having a presence in these markets as Aconex does is an extra advantage.
“You are getting this global participation on projects and having a global footprint gives us an advantage,” Jasper says.
While the Aconex platform has been translated into several languages (including Japanese, Spanish and Chinese) by the company’s in-house translators, the company does not modify the platform to suit particular markets. One of the big advantages of the Aconex system is that it is the same for a user in Abu Dhabi as it is for a user in Adelaide; making market-specific changes to the system would take away from the functionality and consistency.
Indeed, Aconex has actively had to resist requests to change the system for some markets. One of the biggest selling points of the platform is its transparency – everyone working on a project has unfettered access to the documents they need to see. But not everyone in the Middle East is as enthusiastic about transparency as Aconex, and some customers from this region take a little bit of convincing about the benefits.
Instead of re-designing its platform for overseas markets, Aconex ensures it provides customers with a lot of training and support. This is usually provided by local staff that understand the nuances of the culture – so while the company’s overseas offices are often set up by an Australian expat, Aconex quickly hires locals for key customer support roles.
Aconex then uses its global network to provide 24-hour help desk support with a model it calls “follow the sun”. Over the course of a day, the help desk will switch from country to country to ensure customers can get assistance regardless of their location.
The Aconex website also underlines the value the company places on global design. To get ahead of its competition, Aconex has developed a website that features regionalised content for visitors. The website detects where the visitor has come from based on their IP address, and then features all content related to that region.
“This means that any latest news, case studies or project updates for the region are featured on the homepage – positioning us as local in every region we operate in,” Jasper says.
In the last few months Aconex has changed its corporate structure, with regional offices put in place between the company’s sprawling network of offices and headquarters in Melbourne.
It’s a sign of Aconex’s growth from small to medium company, but also more evidence that this is a business with a truly global outlook.
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Related Links
Aconex — www.aconex.com
25 May 2009