Growth Spurt for Datamine
Walking on polished wooden floors past a pool table and a bright orange beanbag in a converted restaurant, you are greeted by a managing director wearing shorts and a ponytail.
The offices of dot-com in San Francisco's India Basin 1998?
Actually, it's 2003 in the former premises of the defunct Brasserie Flipp restaurant in downtown Wellington.
The businessman in shorts is Paul O'Connor, founder of Datamine, a company that makes its living trawling through the archived data of banks, insurance companies and retailers in search of information and techniques to help them better understand and sell to their customers.
Datamine was ranked the 49th fastest growing business in New Zealand by consultancy Deloitte last year, one of the few Wellington firms to make it into the top 50.
Its "multi-million dollar" revenues have almost doubled year-on-year for the past three years, says Mr O'Connor, while its headcount has risen from nine to 18.
Within the next few months Datamine plans to open a three-person office in Auckland.
The company has begun chalking up clients overseas, which now account for 20 per cent of revenues. These include a US insurer and an Australian bank.
The office culture and high revenue growth aside, Datamine has little in common with the dotcoms of the '90s. Data mining, Mr O'Connor admits, "could be perceived as boring", and that helps to explain the firm's non-establishment appearance - part of a culture designed to attract and retain staff.
"It involves looking through databases to find information, but it is really about working with marketing people to help them find the direction for their company."
Datamine's skill set encompasses a knowledge of marketing, programming and statistical analysis.
The company builds bespoke tools for clients to extract, interpret and utilise information from their databases of customer interactions, working with them for between three and five years to achieve their business goals.
It is generally the marketing departments or general management of financial services firms and retailers that engage Datamine's services, rather than clients' IT departments, says Mr O'Connor.
He says it would be going too far to suggest that the fact corporates contract the services of specialist data mining firms is an indictment of the capabilities of mainstream customer relationship management software, which most large firms use to manage their customer information.
But he believes most companies only scratch the surface in terms of using information they collect and store, and he concedes corporate IT departments can sometimes see Datamine as "a bit of a threat".
"We try and work with them as well as we can and we don't see ourselves as standing still. Whenever we do a piece of work we are happy for that to move in-house."
The face-to-face nature of Datamine's pre-sales activity probably precludes more rapid step jumps in the size of the operation, with geographical expansion the route to growth.
Sister company Marketview, run separately but majority-owned by Datamine, has partnered with Telecom and BNZ to help firms analyse their customers by marrying information obtained from eftpos transactions, 0800 call information and the like with information about households obtained from Statistics NZ's five-yearly census.
Essentially a Web-based service that sells itself, Marketview is potentially a higher growth business.
Datamine has also been collecting and patenting intellectual property which may one day hit the jackpot, including software-based technology to help call centres sell more, or achieve better customer service, by assigning agents to customers based on their past success dealing with those with a similar transaction history. If Datamine decides to commercialise this technology, it will probably find a partner or spin the activity off into a separate entity, says Mr O'Connor.