Integrated Research Reviews

The guy who owns the company (over 50% of shares) and founded the company is an unpleasant bullying piece of work with circumstantial evidence of being somewhat misogynistic. The company is a vehicle for paying him a large income in the millions every year even though he is no longer in an active role (he Chairs the Board but is not on staff) – if you look carefully at the published financial records you see that historically and consistently the vast vast majority of profit is paid out to him and the other shareholders leaving very little to be invested in future growth. The result is a small, low growth company of 250 people after 25+ years that even in Sydney nobody has heard of. Unfortunately he is still heavily involved and has never quite learnt to move away from matters that should not be handled by the Board e.g. pushing for certain people to be promoted / not promoted. This does not impact most people and he has signalled that over the next five years he will move away from the company. Fundamentally while he still has over 50% of the shares and runs the board, the company will be constrained. The company is subsidized by a legacy product line (NonStop / Infrastructure) which today produces about 30% of revenue for almost zero cost / investment. The other product lines (Unified Communications) are arguably still not profitable (over 10 years later) or at least are still heavily propped up by the legacy niche. R&D engagement survey results are very poor and have been for a while. The company pushed out a group of poor performing mainly senior developers over the last year in a pretty harsh exercise. People in product development tend to stay at IR for a very long time as it is a comfortable place to work. It tends to mean that those people stop learning new skills and this reduces their value in the market – there is a fair amount of complacency. Generally if you are staying there for more than three years you are not doing yourself any career favours as it is a small low growth organisation. Product Management team – poorly led and suffering from low morale for a number of years. Now run by someone who knows product management but is conservative / political and suffers from a severe lack of charisma. The team is made up of a number of people who have all been there far too long for their own good or the good of the company. Europe / AP – Europe has been a basket case for the last 10 years. Significantly under-performing in terms of sales with some pretty poor leadership over that time. AP is largely channel driven – again successive sales leaders have failed to move the needle much. Both regions together make up only 25% of revenue with the rest in the USA. Sales team in Australia has been a revolving door. HR – Basically AWOL.

The company can't get out of its own way. As somebody reviewed before, a small percentage of the company seems to do the bulk of the work, and bluffing a resignation is still a very common tactic to get rewarded. The R&D of the product is falling back into its old habits of reactionary fixes often causing more harm than good. Proper care for the customer should always naturally beget high customer satisfaction, but now IR finds itself straining to "force" customer care to restore lost satisfaction. Top talent has been starting to voluntarily leave and is even now being sacrificed so the company can save face and cover-up bigger issues. HR does not hold all of the cards, which is the sole purpose of that department. They will act when needed, but only at the direction and the will of the top dog. The EEOC should have their eye closely trained on this place because when the corrupt cops are the puppeteer to Internal Affairs, then Internal Affairs can never stem the corruption.