Graham Technology expands with Eastern promise

Published on Sunday 7 December 2003 00:00

GRAHAM Technology, the Renfrewshire-based software company, is opening an office in Indonesia on the back of winning a significant contract from one of its biggest customers.

The company is looking to take on about 20 staff there to work with Telkomsel. Graham has been supplying software to Telkomsel, the biggest mobile telecoms group in Indonesia, for the past four years.

Telkomsel has more than nine million customers and has placed an order for 500 licences for Graham Technology’s GT-X software on top of the 1,100 licences it already operates. The software is used in Telkomsel’s main Jakarta call centre and also at satellite offices spread across the Indonesian islands.

Graham Technology’s chief technical officer, Mike Hughes, said he hoped to open the office in Jakarta early in the new year and was looking to recruit six staff with numbers increasing to more than 20 later in the year.

He said the key to Telkomsel’s increased reliance on Graham Technology products was the ability of its software to enable staff based in many different locations to deal with customer information.

Telkomsel has more than 70 sites spread across a geographic area the size of Europe.

"Our technology is unique in its ability to allow the company’s staff to carry out business processes anywhere in Indonesia no matter how remote they are from the head office," said Hughes.

He said the office would help spearhead the company’s Far Eastern sales efforts targeted at major companies such as telecoms operators and banks.

Graham is looking to establish other offices around the world in addition to its existing sites in Australia and the US over the next 12 months.

The firm’s figures for the year to March showed it made 1.4m operating profits on turnover of 10.6m and it expects to see that rise to at least 15m in the current year.

It has recently announced a string of new contracts in the UK from customers including Severn Trent Water, ScottishPower and retail group GUS.

The company was founded in 1986 by current chairman and chief executive Iain Graham. It launched its core product, the GT-X customer process management software, in 1994.

In June the company was named Scottish Software Company of the Year in an event backed by Scottish Enterprise.