Talk the talk

Piero Tintori, managing director of software company TERMINALFOUR, talks to David Clerkin.

I understand you develop "out-of-the-box Enterprise Content Management software". What is that?

It covers three main areas - web content management, enterprise content management and e-forms and self-service applications.

"Out-of-the-box" means it's easy to set up and quick to start using.

Web content management allows people to contribute to their company's website, intranet or extranet.

The ultimate business goal is to help people to communicate and share information with colleagues, customers and suppliers.

Enterprise content management concentrates on a company's ability to pull information out of their systems, especially after a big investment in upgrading them. For example, it can allow clients to log onto a special extranet to see copies of invoices.

The e-forms and applications area is perhaps the most exciting at the moment. There are a lot of relatively small tasks that can be automated, such as expenses forms. Automating all these little things can often deliver a bigger return on investment than the higher-profile projects.

How long have you been in business and how big are you now?

We started in 1996 doing small customised software development. Within a year we'd come up with the first version of the product we've continually developed over the last seven years. We now have a staff of 20, of whom two are in Britain at any one time.

Who are your main customers?

We've about 100 clients, with 10 of these in Britain. But Britain accounts for 50% of our revenues because those customers tend to be bigger. We work with well-known names in the education sector, such as Pearson Education, one of the biggest educational publishers.

We also do work for Linguaphone and universities. We've a lot of Irish government clients, such as the IDA, the Department of Justice and some county councils.

You've recently beefed up your operations in Britain. How did you find entering the market and what were the main challenges? How different has it been to doing business at home?

It was very different. There was no language barrier at least, but everything else was a challenge. We were well prepared with a product that was ready to compete with some of the best US-based competitors.

Clients in Britain tend to conduct more due diligence and are even more thorough. There are no spoofers allowed in the market! But it's gone really well for us there.

We're constantly travelling around between clients and are rarely in the office.

How did you find 2004? Are conditions in the IT sector improving?

Last year was a good year for us and we hit our targets. We delivered revenue growth of about 50% year-on-year. It was difficult at times but overall it was positive. We've learned a lot and become more flexible.

We now want to build on what we know locally and in Britain and put more resources into sales. I'm optimistic about next year. We'll have new products and new versions of existing products.