Issue 4 2023

Acquisition International - Issue 4 2023 15 Headquartered in Gosford, New South Wales, OneBlink is a 15-year veteran of the Australian mobile app development sector and has grown to service both corporate clients as well as many State and Local Government entities across Australia and the US. Darren Besgrove enlightens us on the firm’s core product and its innovative offering as it celebrates receiving a Global Excellence Award. Feb23404 elivered as SaaS, OneBlink’s core product Low-code Suite (LcS) is a cloud-based low-code mobile and web app development platform focused on regulatory agencies and regulated industries, as they accelerate their creation of digital inspection forms, checklists, and workflows to meet more stringent risk/compliance obligations. LcS enables non-technical users to rapidly transform their existing risk, regulatory and compliance-oriented processes, for both their internal employee/contractor and external citizen/client solutions. OneBlink’s LcS stands out from other low-code vendors in several ways. Its primary USP is that the one app development platform can equally serve the needs of citizen developers as well as professional developers. Co-Founder, Darren Besgrove, tells us more. “This means that solutions can be primed by business users who are well versed with the issues or problems to be solved, and then further enhanced and refined by technical people with the appropriate skills in user authentication, and back-end system integration. Organisations avoid the issues of multiple development environments for different teams.” Furthermore, OneBlink is a cloud-native low-code platform built on serverless architecture, which means it offers highly scalable and cost-effective solutions. Unlike other vendors, which require a dedicated infrastructure to run, OneBlink utilises the power of the AWS cloud to deliver low-code solutions. Finally, OneBlink offers extensive integration capabilities, enabling developers to integrate their applications with a wide range of systems, databases, and APIs. This makes it easier to build comprehensive applications that connect to other enterprise systems, which is essential for creating seamless workflows. Over the years the product has been refined in direct response to the changing regulatory landscape, by providing greater agility and ease of use for subscribers to respond to time-sensitive challenges more rapidly. With two Co-Founders, Darren and Alan Williams, there is a great combination of different technical and commercial skills that work towards a shared vision. Communicating this vision, and their passion for successful customer outcomes from great product and services, sets the terms for the company values and how the team and team members all operate. “Leading a small but experienced and talented team involves allowing high levels of autonomy and trust,” explains Darren, speaking of the leadership style which he believes has contributed positively to the company. “The diversity of our team becomes an asset when you allow those diverse viewpoints to have a voice and be considered equally.” D In the Blink of an Eye Darren is keen to highlight a recent success story to further enhance OneBlink’s LcS offering. Using Cumberland City Council’s Waste Management project as an example, he elaborates on how the firm sought to find a solution. “The Council’s ‘pain point’ was lack of reporting and efficient management of their waste management services that included kerbside clean-ups and dumped rubbish pickups,” he begins. “They wanted to rethink the kerbside collection process to provide a better customer experience for booking collections, streamlining the allocation of jobs to Council’s waste services contractor and provide valuable data insights on their performance.” The Council’s solution, utilising OneBlink’s LcS application, was to produce three connected apps: a resident web app to search available time slots and book clean-up services; a council staff app to allow allocation of customer jobs to contractor, and the ability for council staff to book jobs on behalf of residents who call via the phone; and a jobs app for the waste services contractor with real time access to job information - job date, physical location, maps and type of waste collection - and the ability for contractor to confirm completion, or report issues. With launch in just over 2 months, the applications have been incrementally enhanced over the last 12 months to provide additional functionality that improve the user experience for residents. The solution has handled more than 150,000 bookings since launch. OneBlink’s successful expansion into the Local Government market with CivicPlus played a significant role in the firm receiving recognition in the AI Global Excellence Awards 2023 and being bestowed with the prestigious accolade of Best Low-Code Application Development Firm 2023 – Australia. “Entering new markets and geographies can be a challenging undertaking for any business, and doing so successfully requires careful planning, execution, and the ability to adapt to new market conditions,” Darren enthuses. “Our expansion into the US market with CivicPlus demonstrates we have a strong strategic vision, effective management practices, and a highly skilled development team committed to providing high-quality solutions to our customers.” Now, with a firm grasp on State and Local Government in Australia and Local Government within the US, OneBlink’s next goal is to take its learnings with Government regulatory agencies like SafeWork NSW and the Department of Primary Industries NSW and test their applicability in other geographies – both across Australia/New Zealand Local and Overseas – in order to continue progressing down the low-code for Government route. Additionally, there are two innovation goals that Darren believes will further solidify OneBlink’s core product in the upcoming years, these being improving the user experience (UX), and making IoT easy. - Contact: Darren Besgrove Company: OneBlink Web Address: www.oneblink.io/

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