Map out: Subury-based software developer changes course to focus on the less volatile municipal market.

Sudbury's Pen Systems is expecting great things to emerge out of a partnership deal with a leading West Coast developer of local government automation software.

The small 10-employee software developer, specializing in the gathering of field data on hand-held devices, signed what they consider a breakthrough deal with Municipal Software Corp. to integrate their flagship software, Inspector + into the Victoria, B.C. company's suite of products.

Both companies have big plans to jointly' market Inspector + with Municipal Software's complementary City View municipal-management software to cities across North America.

The news is The capper of an ongoing revival at Pen Systems after nearly going under six years ago.

"The flying propeller-head squad is going to have to grow," jokes Nigel Leith, Pen's technical director, about whether or not the Lasalle Boulevard firm is hiring prospects in the near future.

Inspector + was developed from their work in data-capturing software for the mining industry in the early 1990s.

Pen experienced some good growth working with gold-mining firms in South Africa and Australia until the price of gold plunged, and so did the company's fortunes.

"We went through a full receivership," says Leith, one of the company's founders. "We put all our eggs in one basket and drifted away from the copper-nickel complex and into gold companies."

Realizing their software had applications beyond mining, Pen has concentrated its efforts on the broader, less-volatile municipal market since restructurin in 1997. Pen has used the City of Greater Sudbury's planning and works department as a kind of Petri dish to further test their products.

Leith credits city officials such as Guido Mazza, George Morel and especially Bill Lautenbach, Sudbury's planning director, an acquaintance of Municipal Software president Rob Bennett, for paving the way for the partnership.

What they learned was there was a potentially huge market in the gathering of field information in areas of fire, building and health inspections, bylaw enforcement and animal control using a wireless hand-held personal access device.

Basically anything that requires a paper application being filled out, says Leith, can be replaced by Inspector +, and in the long run, help seamlessly connect city departments and improve efficiencies.

Differing from their competitors who use wireless Web-enabled applications, Pen's philosophy has been to stay away from the confusion of the industry in the last few years, Leith says.

"We actually deploy a full professional database on small hand-held devices, so if you can't connect to the wireless Web, our devices still run perfectly.

"We can leave someone out in the field for almost a week without a charge on his battery, let alone a Net connection, and he can be inspecting every property and every drain-hole cover in the city."

Pen's innovations, already in standard use with the City of Greater Sudbury, have spread to other municipalities such as Leamington, Muskoka and even in the high-tech triangle of Kitchener-Waterloo where they employ Pen data software, which is linked with a global positioning system, to record the condition of sidewalks and thus reduce the city's liability issues.

Both Leith and marketing director Andrea Tait believe their expertise in field data capturing can extend itself further into other areas of food and biological inspection and medical applications.

They are poised to roll out a hospital package allowing medical personnel to interview patients, running down a checklist of questions on a hand-held device, prior to offering treatment.

The software would also rank patients by a scoring system to rate emergency cases for triage.

Tait says the Inspector + and City View combination compares favourably with Research In Motion's BlackBerry, has wider coverage, is compatible With any hand-held device, is easily updatable to changing municipal legislation and can work with any municipal software system.

"In every city we've quoted the return on investment is under a year," says Tait, especially when factoring in a municipality's ability to defend itself in court.

Having signed a letter of intent to partner with Municipal Software in early June, Pen intends to consummate the joint-venture relationship this summer, intending to hit the trade show circuit next year.

"It's an interesting lesson for small IT firms," says Tait, "because they don't maximize the potential of partnerships and strategically align themselves with companies that have a mutual benefit."

Pen Systems is expecting even better news in the near future and is actively working on a large joint account with Municipal Software for a major sale to what Leith will only describe as a "crown jewel city" in North America.

"It's a major sale and it indicates that (the partnership) is going to work."

www.pensystems.com

www.municipalsoftware.com