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Webcentral
Webcentral, is an Australian digital services provider. It is a publicly traded company that was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in December 1999. It provides internet domain registration, email/office applications, cloud hosting, cloud services & managed services. Founded in 1996, it was the first Australian domain name registrar.
Webcentral's history dates back to April 1996 when Eugene Falk and Professor Peter Gerrand[citation needed] were appointed as chairman and CEO, respectively, for the University of Melbourne's new commercial subsidiary Melbourne Information Technology International, which commenced operations from 1 May 1996. Professor Iain Morrison was appointed the third foundation director of the company. The company chose to trade under the business name of Melbourne IT from its earliest days.
The company's charter was to demonstrate the university's strategic leadership in working with industry and government in selected areas of IT. Its first and continuingly profitable business, up until its float on the Australian Securities Exchange in December 1999, was its joint venture ASAC (Advanced Services Applications Centre) with Ericsson Australia. ASAC was set up to develop applications with synergies between the Internet and advanced telecommunications, particularly mobile products. ASAC was recognised by Ericsson as one of its Global Design Centres in 1997 and contributed $0.5 million in profit to Melbourne IT in the year before its float. ASAC was incorporated as an independent joint venture in December 2000, but became a casualty of Ericsson's downsizing of its global R&D following the bursting of the Dot-com bubble in July 2000.[citation needed]
On 21 June 1996 a front-page article in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) by Charles Wright drew attention to the parlous state of commercial domain name registration in Australia, where a large backlog of Australian businesses was waiting for the processing of their applications for com.au domain names by the part-time domain name administrator, Robert Elz, senior system administrator in the University of Melbourne's Computer Science Department, who declined to communicate with the media.[citation needed]
Robert Elz had been assigned the role of administrator of the .au top-level domain by Jon Postel since 1986, an arrangement that worked quite satisfactorily through the early 1990s when the Internet was largely of interest only to tertiary education and research institutions. The AFR article caused Melbourne University to be aware of the possible commercial value of the rights to assign domain names, but also of the damage to the university's reputation if the registration of com.au domain names was not transferred to a competent commercial organization. The Head of the Computer Science Department persuaded Elz to transfer the administration of com.au names to the University's subsidiary Melbourne IT, which he did by way of a non-exclusive license, to be reviewed after five years. Melbourne IT was awarded a grant of $100,000 by the Government of Victoria in 1996 in return for registering the backlog of over 2,000 com.au applications free to the applicants, and used this money to build its first domain name registration software platform.[citation needed]
From October 1996 Melbourne IT began pricing its services by charging for new and renewed com.au names at 10% below the market rate set by Network Solutions for the popular .com names and was the first domain name registrar worldwide to introduce trademark checking and money-back service assurance guarantees. It also introduced three-tiered pricing for different levels of turnaround time, during the first two years 1997-98 before eligibility decisions were sped up by online access to the Australian trademarks database and to registries of Australian business names and gazetted geographical names. Melbourne IT also moved to align to Robert Elz's rather idiosyncratic eligibility criteria (e.g., ‘no name should in principle be registered if found in an English dictionary; but exceptions had been made to this before 1996 such as news.com.au and travel.com.au, which annoyed other applicants to the rules for registering business names in Australia).[citation needed]
In April 1999, Melbourne IT was selected by ICANN to be one of the first five registrars to register .com, .net and .org names in competition with the incumbent Network Solutions. Entry into the international domain name market from July 1999 greatly increased the company's revenues and market value, and caused the University to prepare the company for an initial public offering. On 14 December 1999, Melbourne IT was floated on the ASX, near the height of the dot-com bubble.[citation needed]
It benefited from a cover story by finance journalist Ivor Rees in a weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review in November 1999, describing it presciently as the ‘Hottest Float of the Year. Interest in the shares was particularly strong because it was the only Australian tech stock floating that year with a track record of actual profitability. Demands for a prospectus were so high that complaints were aired in the media by members of the public unable to obtain one. The chief beneficiaries of the float were the clients of the underwriters, JBWere and CommSec, some of whom made massive stag profits when the stock peaked at $8.20 on the day of its float, compared with the IPO price of $2.20. In 2000 the Victorian Auditor-General held an investigation into whether the stock was undervalued by the underwriters when listed, but concluded that the float had been carried out properly.
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Webcentral
Webcentral, is an Australian digital services provider. It is a publicly traded company that was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in December 1999. It provides internet domain registration, email/office applications, cloud hosting, cloud services & managed services. Founded in 1996, it was the first Australian domain name registrar.
Webcentral's history dates back to April 1996 when Eugene Falk and Professor Peter Gerrand[citation needed] were appointed as chairman and CEO, respectively, for the University of Melbourne's new commercial subsidiary Melbourne Information Technology International, which commenced operations from 1 May 1996. Professor Iain Morrison was appointed the third foundation director of the company. The company chose to trade under the business name of Melbourne IT from its earliest days.
The company's charter was to demonstrate the university's strategic leadership in working with industry and government in selected areas of IT. Its first and continuingly profitable business, up until its float on the Australian Securities Exchange in December 1999, was its joint venture ASAC (Advanced Services Applications Centre) with Ericsson Australia. ASAC was set up to develop applications with synergies between the Internet and advanced telecommunications, particularly mobile products. ASAC was recognised by Ericsson as one of its Global Design Centres in 1997 and contributed $0.5 million in profit to Melbourne IT in the year before its float. ASAC was incorporated as an independent joint venture in December 2000, but became a casualty of Ericsson's downsizing of its global R&D following the bursting of the Dot-com bubble in July 2000.[citation needed]
On 21 June 1996 a front-page article in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) by Charles Wright drew attention to the parlous state of commercial domain name registration in Australia, where a large backlog of Australian businesses was waiting for the processing of their applications for com.au domain names by the part-time domain name administrator, Robert Elz, senior system administrator in the University of Melbourne's Computer Science Department, who declined to communicate with the media.[citation needed]
Robert Elz had been assigned the role of administrator of the .au top-level domain by Jon Postel since 1986, an arrangement that worked quite satisfactorily through the early 1990s when the Internet was largely of interest only to tertiary education and research institutions. The AFR article caused Melbourne University to be aware of the possible commercial value of the rights to assign domain names, but also of the damage to the university's reputation if the registration of com.au domain names was not transferred to a competent commercial organization. The Head of the Computer Science Department persuaded Elz to transfer the administration of com.au names to the University's subsidiary Melbourne IT, which he did by way of a non-exclusive license, to be reviewed after five years. Melbourne IT was awarded a grant of $100,000 by the Government of Victoria in 1996 in return for registering the backlog of over 2,000 com.au applications free to the applicants, and used this money to build its first domain name registration software platform.[citation needed]
From October 1996 Melbourne IT began pricing its services by charging for new and renewed com.au names at 10% below the market rate set by Network Solutions for the popular .com names and was the first domain name registrar worldwide to introduce trademark checking and money-back service assurance guarantees. It also introduced three-tiered pricing for different levels of turnaround time, during the first two years 1997-98 before eligibility decisions were sped up by online access to the Australian trademarks database and to registries of Australian business names and gazetted geographical names. Melbourne IT also moved to align to Robert Elz's rather idiosyncratic eligibility criteria (e.g., ‘no name should in principle be registered if found in an English dictionary; but exceptions had been made to this before 1996 such as news.com.au and travel.com.au, which annoyed other applicants to the rules for registering business names in Australia).[citation needed]
In April 1999, Melbourne IT was selected by ICANN to be one of the first five registrars to register .com, .net and .org names in competition with the incumbent Network Solutions. Entry into the international domain name market from July 1999 greatly increased the company's revenues and market value, and caused the University to prepare the company for an initial public offering. On 14 December 1999, Melbourne IT was floated on the ASX, near the height of the dot-com bubble.[citation needed]
It benefited from a cover story by finance journalist Ivor Rees in a weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review in November 1999, describing it presciently as the ‘Hottest Float of the Year. Interest in the shares was particularly strong because it was the only Australian tech stock floating that year with a track record of actual profitability. Demands for a prospectus were so high that complaints were aired in the media by members of the public unable to obtain one. The chief beneficiaries of the float were the clients of the underwriters, JBWere and CommSec, some of whom made massive stag profits when the stock peaked at $8.20 on the day of its float, compared with the IPO price of $2.20. In 2000 the Victorian Auditor-General held an investigation into whether the stock was undervalued by the underwriters when listed, but concluded that the float had been carried out properly.