Summit of security

When Julian White left his native England for a job in Canada early in 2001, he landed at the same time as the great telecom crash.

Only weeks earlier, his employer, JDS Uniphase, had given him a raise and a mandate to build a team of 20. But when White arrived in Ottawa with his daughter and pregnant wife, the fibre-optics company instructed him to cut staff immediately.

By 2002, his group consisted of just two employees. White knew he had been lucky to survive. He took matters into his own hands by accepting a $50,000 buyout and pursuing a long held dream -- he launched a software company.

The result is Seregon.

This month, the payoff for eight years' of risk and sweat will finally become obvious.

"We've spent a huge amount of effort building applications and getting them into partners' products. April and May will be two great months for us."

For instance, the Ontario Provincial Police will rely on Seregon technology as it provides security at the G8 and G20 summits later this summer in Huntsville and Toronto respectively. Seregon's technology forwards information from central OPP databases into a form that can be readily viewed on BlackBerrys and other smart phones, giving officers on foot the same access to information as colleagues in cruisers equipped with laptop computers.

Seregon doesn't sell to smart phone users directly. In the case of the OPP, it goes through Intergraph, the U.S. software company that developed the dispatch, query and criminal records program for the police service. Seregon's technology allows Intergraph to sell more versions of its dispatch application to the same customer, the OPP.

Seregon has also developed software applications for other types of mobile workers, ranging from sales employees to workers managing inventories. Seregon gets a licence fee for each mobile handset equipped with its software. The startup has more than 20 agreements in place with new customers such as Intergraph and Bricsnet, a facilities management specialist based in San Francisco.

It's still early days for Seregon, which has 15 employees, all based in Ottawa. The company expects to generate sales in excess of $1 million this year.

Beyond that, is anybody's guess. But there's a surprising amount of interest in the firm. Seregon last autumn secured $1 million-plus in seed financing from Purple Angel, the Ontario Centres of Excellence CCR Fund and Zim Corp., the wireless technology company controlled by Michael Cowpland.

Zim's participation is notable, in part because it's the first time Cowpland's firm has made an equity investment. "This gives us a good inside view of the avenues they're exploring that have good prospects," says Cowpland. "We can learn from this."

Zim builds wireless applications for corporate customers, similar to the way Intergraph does for the OPP. Cowpland's firm is profitable but, with annual revenues of less than $2 million, still tiny by the standards of Cowpland's earlier successes, Corel and Mitel.

Nevertheless, Cowpland has always been quick to identify new trends in technology. For instance, he likes Seregon's ability to quickly adapt its technology to many different types of handsets -- Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and, soon, Android and iPhone. The trick: Seregon has developed software tools that allow customers to tweak an application designed for one handset so that it works on many others. Seregon isn't counting on the software tools to generate revenue. Instead, it uses them to help partners such as Intergraph and Zim speed up the development of new applications for smart phones. They share whatever new revenue results.

White, 38, is a long way from the late-1980s when he started his first software company as a teenager.

"People would be very enthusiastic over the phone," he says, "but when they met me they'd say, 'Give me a call in a few years'."

White honed his programming skills at Torquay Technical College in southwest England, and joined Nortel's fibre-optics facilities at nearby Paignton. In 1997, he left to join a components maker that was acquired by JDS Uniphase -- the firm that gave him the opportunity to move to Canada in 2001.

Oddly enough, White's experience at Nortel and JDSU did him very little good when it came to getting Seregon off the ground. More important was his background as a teenage entrepreneur. "Seregon started as a custom software shop," he says. "I'd write software for anybody that wanted it."

White hired his first employees within six months, but business was slow. From 2002 to early 2004, Ottawa's tech industry contracted significantly. White divorced in 2005, when his wife and two children returned to England. "It was tough for her. She was in a new country and didn't know anybody."

Even as White was writing code for others, he tinkered with applications of his own. He dabbled with software for managing customer relations and sales employees, and would show the results to Andrew Moffat -- an Ottawa software entrepreneur and White's mentor. Moffat never really got excited until White managed to port some corporate software to a BlackBerry. Moffat stared at the result without saying a word for about 30 seconds. "This is really cool," he said finally.

Encouraged, White began targeting companies that could benefit by pushing their applications to a smart phone. He signed up Intergraph little more than a year ago, thanks to a salesman he hired who was familiar with the public security industry. Similarly, another Seregon employee had once worked at Zim and provided a link there. The Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation provided introductions to angel investors. However, many of Seregon's inroads came through the hard effort of making cold calls. "The first sales guy I had was on the phone non-stop. I found him through networking locally."

Indeed, that's the impressive part about Seregon -- it emerged from nowhere. All it took was an outsider with lots of energy and no fear about asking for help.

E-mail: jbagnall@thecitizen.canwest.com.

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