Korbitec has a short history but a long heritage that rests on software development. With its "rocket" strategy already providing a distribution deal with Microsoft, the company is confident it can sustain a development approach.
Korbitec likes to refer to its various projects as "rockets" because it invests in killer apps, which are slow and expensive to build. Once assembled, these rockets are expected to take off with a bang big enough to make people sit up and take notice.
The Korbitec entity came into existence in March 1999 with a management buy-out from Datatec, but MD Mendel Karpul says the core of the company has a 20-year history as development house Compustat and Internet pioneer Internet Africa. Compustat started life as a Fortran development house and later developed the GhostWriter package that the company says is still in use.
"Software development is not Datatec`s focus," Karpul says. So it retained a 35% stake and 50% was sold to management. With annuity income flowing and R70 million in funding behind it, Korbitec embarked on its rocket strategy.
"A rocket is a research and development project with the potential to bring in R50 million over a five-year period," says Karpul. Over the next five years the company hopes to initiate 20 rockets, with an expected success rate of 25%.
Four such projects are currently underway, one of which is expected to start showing a return within the year. The products are quite diverse, linked only by Korbitec`s belief that they could be massively successful.
Ncrypt is a data security offering that marketing director Mark Todes describes as "high risk, enormous potential". As Karpul tells it, a group of mathematicians approached the company with a fresh view on encryption. "These guys are geeks and it is very difficult to understand their concept. Before us others turned them away because they couldn`t understand it, but we sat down and made them explain it again and again."
With conceptual understanding achieved, Korbitec backed the project, and the first releases are expected in the last quarter of this year. Karpul describes Ncrypt as a system that incorporates trusted relationships, encryption and node-based security.
EZbook.com is a simple resource management Web server. Already online, the system allows the online booking of common company resources, limited at the moment to reserving company meeting rooms.
"It is a classic Internet play, with the usual Web revenue streams like advertising," Todes says. A pilot project in North America towards the middle of the year will try to build critical mass for the site.
The third rocket is GhostFill, a descendant of GhostWriter. "It`s templates on steroids," Karpul describes it. GhostFill allows standardised but complex documents to be assembled fast. The application is expected to be popular with in the legal, insurance and banking world. According to Karpul, Microsoft SA will bundle GhostFill with Microsoft Word from April, and he says Microsoft Benelux plans to do the same in Europe.
SA Legal, the last project the company will talk about, continues the traditional legal bend of Compustat with niche legal applications. Karpul says several new such products will be released during 2000. "It is not as exciting as some of the other things we do, but it does keep the money flowing in," he says.
Karpul and Todes are very excited about the future of their company, but say the now traditional listing-and-acquisition route is not part of the plan. "We will list only if a product demands a massive marketing campaign that we can`t support," Karpul says. But they expect to catch the public eye even without market exposure. "There are not a lot of firms doing research and development," Todes says. "It is something we are fiercely proud of."
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