OAM recipient Adrian Di Marco on ‘winging it’ to TechnologyOne’s $9.7bn success

A son of Italian migrants, who built one of Australia’s most successful software companies, has been awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia for his contribution to the tech sector.

Adrian Di Marco, the founder of TechnologyOne, one of Australia’s largest software companies. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

The founder of one of the nation’s first start-ups has received an Australia Day honour for his contribution to the tech sector.

Adrian Di Marco, the founder of TechnologyOne – one of the nation’s most successful software companies, which began in 1987 and listed on the ASX in December 1999 – has received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM).

The company’s products are now used around the world by local councils, governments and universities to manage student numbers, process development applications and even manage council rubbish collection.

Asked about his award, Mr Di Marco said he was grateful “that Australia welcomed my parents in the 50s and gave us the opportunity to live in such a wonderful country full of opportunities and freedoms”.

Mr Di Marco is the son of Italian migrants who arrived in Australia in 1950. He attended St James College and graduated with a degree in science from the University of Queensland – a degree that gave him access to one of the few early computers in Australia.

“I was very fortunate because they had just put in a mainframe computer there and, through my brother, I got access to it and fell in love with computers,” he said.

“Back then if you wanted to work with computers you had to do a science course, and as part of the science course, you could get access to computers, so I chose science.”

After university, Mr Di Marco moved to Sydney to work for Accenture, at the time known as Arthur Andersen, for several years, before moving back to Brisbane as he attempted to build software products.

“I didn’t want to work for a big multinational, so I decided to come back to Brisbane and I thought that it was the place to be really, a place with lots of opportunities and potential,” he said.

“Having worked with the multinationals, I got to see what state of art was back then for software products, which was pretty bad, and I thought there was a better way to do it.”

Mr Di Marco began TechOne at a time when there was little to no capital support for start-ups. “We were one of the first start-ups (in Australia) but there was no venture capital back then so I had to approach a past customer of mine,” he said.

“Initially we started with a core product which was an accounting system called FinanceOne and then we built more functionality around it and eventually we became an enterprise vendor competing with companies like Oracle and SAP.”

Mr Di Marco said that for much of his career, he and his team were just “winging it”.

“We were just a bunch of young kids, we really didn’t know what we were doing and no one had really done in Australia what we were trying to do, which was to build true software products here,” he said.

“We sort of just winged it, really, making lots of mistakes and learning from them and slowly we found a niche and we used it to ­expand.”

Mr Di Marco expects the next major revolution will involve AI and robotics, but he believes Australia isn’t well placed to capitalise on it.

The Australian government, he said, had failed to support the IT industry while focusing on an “easy ride” in minerals.

“Unfortunately, Australia is not well positioned at all in this area. There really needs to be a big focus given to it if we’re going to be part of that, but we don’t have the robotics piece,” he said.

“I think it’s a problem that has been a problem for 40 years in Australia … The government is too focused on our minerals and it’s an easy ride for us. We can mine the stuff and ship it overseas and we don’t need to do a lot of value-adding …

“It’s made us complacent.”

Originally published as OAM recipient Adrian Di Marco on ‘winging it’ to TechnologyOne’s $9.7bn success