Multibase has adapted to the changing business and technology environment over 25 years by retaining its sense of perspective, managing risk, and concentrating on developing business value, aligning information technology with business goals, creating sustainable solutions - and putting its accumulated wisdom at the disposal of its clients.

With nearly 30 staff, and an impressive range of skills and experience, Multibase can readily help business owners with both existing and new technical systems to leverage the value of their long term technology investments. In this way we help business to access their marketplace and achieve better business outcomes.

Multibase typically supports its customers beyond an initial project, often for many years. Our commitment is to understand your business and help you to align your information technology strategies with your business goals.

How is this achieved? Multibase can demonstrate that this takes more than specific technology skills: it requires a long-term commitment to finding solutions, with a combination of:

• specific technology skills, such as programming languages or server operating systems
• expertise in IT management capabilities such as application design, project management, testing, and system management
• business communication and collaboration skills

A model for the longevity of information technology skills was developed by Scott W. Ambler , showing how long particular skills remained relevant.

This information has a number of implications:

• Technologies and technical skills change rapidly and need to be refreshed regularly. Technical expertise is expendable. A business relying on in-house technical skills will need to allow for constant training and upskilling. Absence of the related skills to manage the technology itself, the people and their skills, and IT projects themselves is a risk in terms of achieving the best value from technology.
• To achieve the best from technical resources requires high level skills in their managers. These are harder to acquire, will typically be exercised by employees with greater maturity, and will be more expensive. If high level management skills are available, the system may well require less in terms of total time and cost than if they are not. Many organisations may not require a full time technical manager yet need access to high level technical management skills to achieve the best business outcomes.
• Communication and collaboration skills typically remain relevant and continue to develop regardless of changes in the technical environment. They may be the most difficult to achieve and sustain, and the high level skills required may not be found in non-technical organisations, particularly small to medium sized. It follows that for a non-technical organisation, its business partnerships with trusted, high quality technical advisers are amongst its greatest assets and their absence a significant risk. Such collaboration with a trusted partner on the development, implementation and management of information technology systems is therefore both an investment and a valuable risk management strategy.

Achieving the optimum combination of technical, technical management and communication and collaboration skills is important to optimising your information technology investments and their performance. Aligning technology with business goals will increase the longevity of all your technology-related investments. Well managed technology services can cost less than can continue to create value for longer, and access to a greater and deeper range of skills than can be achieved in-house.

Organisations need to choose what to do in-house and what to obtain from a partner. To help with this choice, Multibase has developed over more than a quarter of a century the proven ability to design, develop, integrate and support information technology solutions for its clients. It has always recognised that information technology services must be provided at affordable prices, deliver a return on investment, and achieve quality technical outcomes that support business objectives.

Accumulated wisdom

Software tools developer

Incorporated in Sydney, NSW in February 1983 Multibase was formed as a specialist supplier of application development tools for the Unix Open Systems environment.

The company is well known as the author of CL4, a set of software development tools for the Unix environment, an integrated Relational Database Management system, and Fourth Generation Language for the Unix environment which was first released in 1984.

CL4 originally achieved business penetration by being selected as software distributed with NEC tower computers with sample applications including a full accounting system and a pioneering business intelligence application. Significant projects from this period included developing software running the Australian Federal election, the general accounting system for the Papua New Guinea government, and financial services applications in the superannuation industry.

Today, Multibase’s original partners remain active within the business, and some of Multibase’s major customers continue their business relationship through their CL4 applications. With CL4 now a mature legacy environment, Multibase’s team of CL4 developers provide services such as application management, maintenance and support, integrating legacy systems into modern technical systems, business continuity, and data centre hosting.

Distributor of third party software tools

In 1989, because of its broad expertise in database technology, software development tools, operating systems and networking, Multibase was selected as the UNIFACE distributor in this region. UNIFACE is an integrated cross-platform software development environment. Multibase was one of the few selected alpha test sites for UNIFACE software releases. Its proven expertise to create related software such as database drivers and CASE bridges gave it experience still used today in the development of APIs for system integration and remote data access services.

In 1993, Multibase WebAustralis was selected as THE Guide distributor in this region. THE Guide is a scalable, technology-independent methodology for application software development.

In 1994, Multibase created Uniface Australasia to concentrate on its UNIFACE activities. In addition, Uniface established its Asia Pacific Headquarters in Sydney and based its Asia Pacific Support Centre on the expertise of the Multibase support team.

When UNIFACE was first promoted in this region it was an unknown overseas product offering an entirely new genre of technology. Over the ensuing 5 years Multibase made it into a well regarded highly successful product and the local organisation into one of the most successful sales and support organisations of its type.

As the result, in early 1995, Compuware Asia Pacific purchased the sales and support of UNIFACE from Multibase.

Internet services

Multibase was an early participant in the expansion of Australian Internet services, and now has experience across the industry.

Internet access. In 1995, the WebAustralis brand was established as an ISP offering dialup and ISDN Internet access to clients in Sydney, Adelaide, and NSW country. With the commoditisation of Internet access through DSL and cable, Multibase re- focused this business on solution development, integration and hosting.
Web sites. Multibase purchased and rebuilt a small Adelaide-based web developer as a design partner for complex systems. The business was later sold to management and Multibase expanded with in-house web-focused business analysts, designers and developers.

Web applications. The integration of Internet technology into CL4, and the creation of web applications built with CL4, allowed Multibase to be an early proponent of high functional web applications. In the web space, initial developments were online catalogues, shopping carts and content management systems from 1996. Other applications followed in a variety of development environments, including Microsoft and open source technologies.

Custom solution development and management. Multibase undertook a number of pioneering bespoke development and integration solutions for significant clients such as business information supplier Espreon (then Legalco), financial services provider Watson Wyatt, NSW Department of Mineral Resources, NSW Roads and Traffic Authority, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, SA Department of Treasury and Finance, Oxfam Australia, media services provider Renovation Depot, the South Australian Financing Authority and GM Cabs.

Legacy system services. While support continued for traditional green screen business applications, a web-enabled CL4 allowed owners of legacy CL4 applications to protect and leverage their software investments with a range of strategies which have become today’s legacy system services – among them attractive graphic interfaces to backend business systems and legacy system integrations into new business applications. The development of CLDBLib in the mid 2000s opened the CL4 database to application development in other popular modern development languages, allowing retention of existing databases and business logic.

Outsourced hosting. From 1995, Multibase developed an in-house hosting operation, which was transferred to the international class Fujitsu Internet Data Centre in North Ryde, Sydney in 2002. This is managed by Multibase as an enterprise-grade specialist datacentre hosting service, including web and server hosting and management, application hosting and management, often integrated with advanced communications technologies.

Web 2.0. The emergence of the Internet as an application delivery platform in the current decade is the right environment to further develop Multibase’s experience with a wide range of interactive web applications (including catalogues, portals, content management systems and bespoke solutions). In this context, Multibase can now truly be seen as a technology-agnostic provider of complete managed solutions for business, typically falling in the category of “Web 2.0” applications such as social networking, content management systems, business process management systems, and web-based application development environments.

Software as a Service provider

As the business world began to appreciate the opportunities of interactive web applications in the late 1990s, Multibase brought together the strands of its business as a supplier and partner in a number of major web business ventures. The resulting applications were offered on a SaaS (Software as a Service) delivery model, where a web-native software application is hosted and operated for use by its customers over the Internet using a web interface. Customers do not pay for owning the software itself but rather for using it. Typically these applications are hosted in one multi-tenanted instance at a fraction of the cost and with far greater functionality than could be achieved by one customer.

These applications include:

• BLC Suppliers, a multi-vendor purchasing portal and loyalty scheme for the building industry
• iSport powered by SAMSON, a web-based sports management system for amateur sport
• ePay, including payment gateway, scheduled recurring payments, security and mobile device payment modules
• Netbroker, a multi-tenanted information retrieval providing secure access to data stored in remote systems
• Livesite, including catalogue and content management functions
• Unifleet, a web-based industry standard plant and vehicle fleet management and reporting system.

Managed solutions

Today, Multibase delivers business IT projects that need clever and economical solutions. We also design and deliver complete and integrated whole-of-business IT solutions. Whatever the project, we support it to deliver confidence to your business each day.

Multibase specialises in preserving the value already invested in business processes, systems and technology in solutions that meet new business demands.

Our typical customers are small to medium businesses in a wide range of industries – like travel, property services, construction, financial services, transport, as well as government and not-for-profit.

As a well-established Australian information technology services company, we have the expertise to solve complex IT problems in smart ways that can save money and drive better business performance.