Sydney-based EnviroSuite started life in 2008 when Pacific Environment rolled up four environmental consultancies - Pacific Air and Environment, Holmes Air Sciences, Toxicos and New Environment Quality - and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.
It also planned to continue developing what was a very early-stage EnviroSuite platform at the time.
While revenue followed, partly through organic growth and via acquisitions, when the first pilot software platform was launched in 2011 it gathered further momentum when the company fully rebuilt it through 2014-15 into a cloud-based system so it could grow globally.
The company set about commercialising EnviroSuite worldwide, setting up shop in January this year before appointing ex-Santos process engineer Andrew Shek in February to build a team in Brisbane to target the resources sector.
Pacific Environment had already been involved with Australia Pacific LNG upstream operator Origin Energy, while a host of coal operators have picked up EnviroSuite.
The sale of Pacific Environment to ERM for $15 million was part of EnviroSuite's purely technology-focused strategy to have a distribution plan based not so much on sales a partnership strategy.
The new deal involved EnviroSuite entering into a collaboration agreement with ERM for future joint sales and product development activities to support ERM's diverse global client base.
ERM has an established internal structure to identify and incorporate external technologies and services into its consulting projects, and to this end ERM has already identified a number of current project opportunities in which it intends to involve EnviroSuite's services.
EnviroSuite now has a rapidly growing pipeline, new sales partners and recent sales in Spain, UK, US and Mexico across a range of industry sectors and government.
All 75 staff in EnviroSuite's consulting practice will now transfer to ERM while the remaining software sales, marketing, development, implementation and support teams will focus on building and supporting a global customer portfolio.
EnviroSuite's cloud-based software solutions are used by leading global resource, utility, infrastructure and manufacturing organisations as well as regulators to manage risk, comply with stringent environmental requirements and address community concerns, while delivering efficiency gains and cost benefits.
"The software story has huge potential about it and can happen in a fairly short space of time, just because of the nature of software being fairly borderless, you don't need a lot of people and it's not very capitally intensive," EnviroSuite director Adam Gallagher told Energy News.
"It's selling licenses to a cloud-based system. That's what's really excited out investor base being a listed company - they're always quite keen to see companies that have the ability to grow quickly into a large market.
"It also brings other consultancies closer to us.
"When we have our own consulting expertise other consultancies were a bit reluctant to get involved, but that's certainly changed now and we're not involved with the world's largest in PRM, which has 4500 people globally."
He said EnviroSuite's cloud-based nature meant its implementation time was "extremely quick compared to our first clunky versions that we produced".
"We can set up some clients over a few days, which was a few months when we first started," he said.
"The technology is now post-adolescent and able to stand on its own two feet, and with relatively solid backing thanks to the proceeds of the consulting sale."
EnviroSuite enables users to translate complex data into information that they can use simply and on-demand to make better-informed decisions via real-time data management and visualisation; predictive functions including risk forecasting; incident intelligence and event analysis; and automated reporting.
