HRD announcement this morning. Very positive address by the executive chairman.
Have a read and make up your own minds. I dont think the market understands its full potential
Cheers
ADDRESS TO BE GIVEN BY MR GRAME BARTY, EXECUTIVE
CHAIRMAN OF HARVESTROAD LTD, TO THE ANNUAL
GENERAL MEETING OF THE COMPANY TO BE HELD AT RACV
123 QUEEN STREET MELBOURNE AT 11.00am ON 25TH
NOVEMBER, 2004
A banner year for financial performance
The Financial Year 2003-2004 has represented a milestone achievement for
HarvestRoad in its commercial development.
Not only did our financial performance exceed all forecasts – including record revenues
of $9.2m and a record maiden before tax and deferrals profit of $3.2m– we cemented
our position as a global leader in commercial off-the-shelf content management solutions
in the education public sector, for profit higher education and corporate university
markets.
In particular, the $11.0 million Latin America CIMED Project awarded in December 2003
is currently the world’s largest implementation of eLearning covering 13 Central and
South American countries and integral to its success is the HarvestRoad Hive® content
delivery and management strategy based on single learning objects rather than entire
course packages.
Similarly, HarvestRoad achieved success in other key reference accounts globally
including the Defence Academy in the UK, The Correspondence School in New Zealand,
Portland State University, USA and more recently the Florida Long Distance Learning
consortium – a community of nearly 1.0m users over a variety of educational institutions.
Learning exchanges are emerging globally
These accounts represent the forerunners of a rapidly emerging market requirement for
B2B style ‘learning exchanges’ where buyers and suppliers of educational content can
trade.
This means that not only is it now important to be able to capture and store learning
content, but also to copyright that content right down to component level. By way of
example, a book can be stored with each chapter, diagram or page being a distinct
object, rather than the book itself. This will now be how an organisation stores – and
values – its intellectual capital. As such managing Copyright is emerging as a critical
component within learning institutions and HarvestRoad is placing a great deal of
resources in expanding the existing Advanced Copyright Engine capability integral of
HarvestRoad Hive® and shortly we expect to announce a strategic relationship with a
leading participant in this field.
Packaged Content broken down to smaller ‘learning objects’ then becomes purposeful
not only in terms of their reuse within an institution but also for collaboration across
institutions; to either increase the quality and level of course instruction and therefore the
institutions ‘brand’ , or simply to create a powerful new means of revenue generation in
the resale of content. Done on a global basis of course the potential for income return is
significant - something Australian organisations will find increasingly attractive as
government fund allocations are reduced.
HarvestRoad has prime mover advantage
Investors will be pleased to know that HarvestRoad Hive® has the inherent capability to
become the ‘learning exchange’ trading educational content between say, universities or
departments of education or even industry based corporations. HarvestRoad Hive® can
capture and break down existing content into its component parts .This content can then
be copyrighted and made available for reuse by others either into on-line learning
courses, classroom education or distance education.
This will allow learning organisations to regain value from investments in content
production already made whilst establishing very flexible, cost effective processes for
distributing and selling new content globally.
The innovation used by HarvestRoad in ‘reverse engineering’ existing course material off
desk tops and directly into the learning exchange is very powerful and unique in its
approach and a first in the market.
Resulting in tier one partnerships
The capability of HarvestRoad Hive® to deliver a unique global marketplace ‘learning
exchange’ solution has attracted partnerships with a number of very important
technology company’s such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle and PeopleSoft and IBM. This
has enabled the Company to gain access to major opportunities world wide supported
by these household names. HarvestRoad now plans to build on these relationships
through combined research and development and co-operative marketing and selling of
the HarvestRoad Hive® capability – including the potential for OEM licensing. As a
business model HarvestRoad will maintain its focus on commercial off-the-shelf software
development of the learning exchange ‘engine’ and look to its partners to sell and
service the capability to worldwide markets in K-12, vocational education, higher
education, business institutes and corporate universities.
Open Standards are the key to next generation solutions
Your Company has been very active in the eLearning standards arena and is considered
as a thought leader by many. During the year we made a number of contributions to the
standards specifications for reusable learning objects delivering on our strategy to be the
foremost standards based independent repository in the global eLearning market.
HarvestRoad has not only been involved in ‘open standard’ development with reusable
learning objects but has also been a strong advocate of increasingly popular global
trend ‘open source’ solutions including the integration of Linux operating systems,
Apache Web Server, MySQL data base and RELOAD content assembly into
HarvestRoad Hive®. Additionally the Company is now working with the two leading
standards research institutes - the ADL Academic Co-Lab collocated at the University of
Wisconsin and the University of Hull in UK – combined with Sun Microsystems to
develop the HarvestRoad Hive® integration with rapidly emerging next generation open
source Learning Management Systems.
Establishing a global company
The Company has now established offices in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra,
Mexico City and London and by the end of 2004 will have a presence in the USA from
which to leverage our expansion into that market. In particular, today we are pleased to
announce that Cannon Learning Services based in Athens, Georgia has been appointed
as our first ‘Platinum Level’ services partner in the USA. We are also negotiating with
Cannon Learning Services to be HarvestRoad’s Global Training Authority with
responsibility for developing and running both client training and Partner Certification
programmes around the world.
During the year, we have also established exciting evaluation projects in France,
Holland, and Canada and we hope to move these to a more significant commitment by
early 2005.
Perhaps, most importantly, while still only a small company by most standards, there is
no doubt we have created and delivered a product and capability that today exceeds the
offering of most big companies. This is reflected by the types of business opportunities
we are securing, in the generous support we have received from Standards bodies, and
also the level and interest shown by our technology partners globally.
Building on our vision
Our challenge therefore in 2005 is to harness our technical capability and vision for the
next generation of services with the strength and capability of very large global
marketing organisations such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and PeopleSoft and to
match these capabilities with the demand for independent, federated, digital learning
object repository systems. This challenge also requires us to extend that vision even
further. It requires a new level of research and development which I wish to share with
you today.
Much of what I have spoken about is technically referred to as ‘unstructured content’:
that is, information can come from any source and be assembled in any order.
HarvestRoad is now researching the potential to integrate ‘unstructured’ learning content
with ‘structured’ content such as commonly found in technical or specification manuals.
For example, consider the scenario where an aircraft mechanic in a remote field requires
to source a fault and change a part. Using HarvestRoad Hive® as a single repository of
information, the mechanic can firstly look up the specification, if that is not clear then
they can access a schematic to show how the parts should work together. Furthermore,
if the mechanic is not qualified to make the repair request, the immediate delivery of an
online course package assembled from the repository allows him or her to be certified as
competent to undertake the repair and to actually do so. No returning to the classroom
and no waiting for a qualified mechanic to be sent into the field.
The advantages of this type of immediate on the spot, remote training are enormous for
a corporation’s operational performance and cost management in relation to downtime
and maintenance and we see this as a significant future direction for HarvestRoad with a
positive impact on our business growth by being a leader in developing this capability.
Currently, we are jointly researching this opportunity with an international Fortune 500
level company. We hope to provide a more detailed announcement about this
relationship and its business potential which we estimate to be worth many millions of
dollars, in early February 2005.
Together with the other business opportunities that our global partners have bought to
us, we see the year ahead as being both exciting and profitable.
Providing unlimited growth potential for HarvestRoad
In summary, we are operating in very exciting times for HarvestRoad. The market now
clearly understands the value of our learning exchange application proposition and we
are actively working to take it to another level with the integration of a structured content
capability.
A small company with big company intellectual property, HarvestRoad will continue to
attract strong partnerships and key accounts over the next three years as we take
advantage of our prime mover market position. This will increasingly elevate our
corporate profile and further enhance our reputation as a niche vendor.
We believe that this will result in increasing shareholder value and we look forward to
continuing to deliver on our promise of being an established, profitable global technology
company with unlimited potential.
Grame Barty
Executive Chairman
25th November 2004
HRD
harvestroad limited
very positive address by executive chairman
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