Technology entrepreneur Marty Gauvin will tomorrow reveal the inside story of how he built Hostworks into a national success as well as naming future IT hotspots at Playford Capital’s entrepreneur’s event.

The October 27 breakfast seminar for an invitation-only audience of Adelaide business builders will take place at the Sebel Playford Hotel on Adelaide’s North Terrace.

Playford Capital invests seed capital in early-stage South Australian companies as well as partnering with entrepreneurs to provide investment, business strategy and industry contacts for businesses in a broad range of industries.

Mr. Gauvin, 41, established Hostworks in 1999 as a specialist web application services provider for large enterprises. Within two years, he listed the company on Australian Stock Exchange and went on to acquire several companies that entrenched and extended its market leadership. Hostworks was sold to Macquarie-owned Broadcast Australia at the market peak in late 2007.

Mr. Gauvin left his transition role with Hostworks earlier this year to pursue business opportunities based on cloud computing technololgy. He said cloud computing presented a compelling business case. “For businesses to be most effective, they must be flexible and responsive,” he said.

“Traditional IT businesses can’t be flexible and responsive because they have so much capex (capital expenditure) tied up in their operations. With cloud computing, a service can be provisioned in an hour instead of months. It can be acquired by the month rather than making a commitment for three years. And it can scale on demand to meet your needs.

“Cloud computing is moving very quickly, admittedly off a small base, as part of the hosting market globally. Today traditional IT hosting is worth about US$16 billion per annum – half of it in the US and half in the rest of the world – while cloud computing is worth about US$300 million.

“Over the next few years, there will be an increasing trend for companies to outsource their IT complexity while traditional outsourcing customers move their systems into the cloud. By 2012-13, cloud computing is expected to overtake traditional outsourcing. I want to grab that tiger by the tail.”

Mr. Gauvin is currently developing three business opportunities. The most advanced is facilitating and providing expertise to build a substantial SA-based data centre. His second venture is a services company that will provide application management for enterprise customers in a cloud computing environment. The third business aims to develop management software for cloud deployment, using licensed IP.

Mr. Gauvin said his speech at the Playford seminar would also cover the development of Hostworks. “I’m going to talk about the exciting journey of building a company from scratch to be listed, raising capital to buy other companies and then selling it at the peak of the market,” he said.

“That journey has shown me that there are four ingredients needed to start a business. There’s the initial idea, the time to develop it, the resources to build it – in many cases, this is money – and the team. In terms of team make-up, every entrepreneurial business needs to fill four roles: Innovator; Implementer; Administrator; and Leader.

“Having left Hostworks, I’ve developed a much detailed understanding of team and loyalty. People aren’t loyal to businesses – they are loyal to people. The team you get around you drives the outcomes and also drives your enjoyment of what you’re doing.”

For more information about Playford Capital, visit www.playford.com.au

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