Vancouver company’s laptop theft recovery system will pick up a million subscribers
Gillian Shaw
Sun
Absolute Software’s John Livingston turned down a tenured teaching job to join the Vancouver tech start-up. Photograph by : Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun
Absolute Software Corp. hit pay dirt Tuesday in a lucrative deal with computer giant Dell Inc. that will give it a million new subscribers for its laptop theft recovery software, and help the Vancouver company more than triple sales for the coming year.
News of the deal, along with the company’s report of strong second-quarter revenues, saw shares in Absolute climb 25 per cent on the Toronto Stock Exchange, closing at $11.15. The stock traded as high as $12.19 during Tuesday’s session.
“I would call it a home run,” said Absolute chief executive and board chairman John Livingston. “We’re really doing well.”
It is the latest in a series of successes for the company, and further confirms for Livingston that he made the right decision back in 1995 when he gave up his day job and the promise of a secure future at the British Columbia Institute of Technology to join the fledgling start-up.
Then an instructor in BCIT’s business department, the Vancouver native, who graduated from St. George’s school and from the University of Calgary with an MBA, Livingston had just been offered a permanent position at BCIT when Christian Cotichini, who co-founded Absolute with Fraser Cain, convinced him to join the company full time.
“I called my wife and said, ‘I have news for you — I’m turning down a tenured position to join this new company’. She said, ‘You have to hear my news, I’m pregnant.’
“She wasn’t too happy that I was going from a tenured, secure job position to take a chance in a start-up.”
While it hasn’t been totally smooth sailing, the company found itself on the leading edge of the mobile computing revolution with its tracking, management and theft-recovery systems for laptop computers in increasing demand.
“The early years were very challenging, there is no question about it,” said Livingston. “But it was a great idea, it has managed to continue to prevail, and it is taking off.”
The company’s theft-recovery software is embedded in computers offered by many major manufacturers. And like E.T., it operates by “calling home” when the computer is lost or stolen.
“We are embedded in the firmware of the computer, so when the machine is connected to the Internet, we get a call from the computer. We use that information and we can find out where it is calling from, and we work with law enforcement,” said Livingston. “We are recovering over 75 per cent of computers that are calling us.”
While Absolute already has partnerships with Dell and major computer manufacturers, the latest deal gives the company a major boost, guaranteeing one million new subscribers for its Computrace LoJack for laptops, which will be bundled with Dell’s extra warranty package.
Computrace LoJack, valued between $49 and $119 US for systems with one- to four-year warranties, will be included in Dell’s CompleteCare Accidental package, sold with new Dell Inspiron notebooks at prices ranging from $99 to $139.
It will be available for Dell’s U.S. customers. LoJack is also available for purchase on its own from Dell software and peripherals at prices ranging from $49 to $139 US.
Absolute signed up 600,000 new subscribers last year and expects to sign up double that number this year, in addition to the one million subscribers that Dell brings to the table. Its customers are both businesses and individuals, with the consumer market making up 16 to 18 per cent of its sales annually. The Dell bundle program, which began on Jan. 17, has already generated $350,000 US in consumer sales subscriptions.
Livingston said that is only a start.
“There is tons of room for Absolute to grow,” he said. “We are still only attached to two per cent of the notebooks shipped in the United States.
“We are driving the anti-theft market, and we think we can get it into the 10- to 15-per-cent attach rates to new notebooks over a several-year period.”
On Tuesday, the company also reported a loss of $1 million or five cents per share on revenue of $4.6 million for the three months ended Dec. 31, which compares with a loss of $708,000 or three cents per share on revenue of $2.7 million for the same period a year ago.
The company has grown to a staff of 135, with 100 based in the downtown Vancouver office and the rest spread across the U.S. And two of the three BCIT students Livingston persuaded to go with him when he joined Absolute remain with the company today.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
