IBA opens up Lorenzo

Australian e-health software firm IBA Health today said it intended to follow the footsteps of companies like Apple and SAP, opening up its new Lorenzo platform for developers to write applications.

Gary Cohen
(Credit:IBA Health)

The company said Lorenzo, its service-oriented architecture-based healthcare platform, was due for a global launch in November. "We'll be opening it up to allow other people to write applications onto that platform," IBA Health executive chairman Gary Cohen said today at the company's annual results briefing for the year ended 30 June 2008.

In response to a query as to how open the company meant Lorenzo to be, Cohen said "it will be very open", calling the move a "core part of our strategy".

"If you look at companies like Apple and SAP, where they've been able to get significant growth is getting companies to write solutions [for their platforms]," Cohen said.

Cohen said that he believed that Lorenzo could gain scale by harnessing the power of external developers to write applications.

IBA slotted Lorenzo into its array of software when it completed its acquisition of iSoft last year in October.

Today at the results, Cohen said the integration of iSoft had been finished by 30 June 2008, and that the company had exceeded the $27 million in synergies per year it had expected.

Cohen also said IBA Health had improved on iSoft's relationship with CSC, the contractor delivering Lorenzo to the National Health Service in the UK, which it believed would lend it significant growth opportunities in the coming year.

Speaking on global markets, Cohen said Australia meant little to IBA Health, with 85 per cent of the company's market sitting offshore. "What happens in Australia from a growth point of view doesn't affect us at all," Cohen said.

IBA's focus was Europe, especially the UK, the Middle East and Latin America, according to Cohen.

However, he said the company had hedged its risk. "We're not betting the farm on the UK." Should the market on the island turn sour, the company also had eyes on the 85 million Germans on the continent.

In Australia the company already held 60 per cent of the e-health market, Cohen said, and IBA expected the new Labor government to be positive for the market.

Aside from growth, the company also hoped to improve margins, earmarking $21 million for ICT network and hardware as well as standardising and modernising its applications in the 2009 financial year.

IBA Health has already achieved significant growth in its revenues over the year, increasing from $75 million last year to $361 million this year. The net profit of the company, however, has dropped from $23 million to $14.6 million.