Game, set and match with Limerick firm to provide cloud program to Australian Open

A LIMERICK businessman is celebrating after securing a high-profile contract with the biggest sporting event on the Southern Hemisphere.

Mark Cochrane, who founded Trackplan, has won a deal to provide his maintenance, asset and contract manufacture software to the Australian Open tennis championship.

Taking place in January each year, the grand slam event attracts almost one million people, and is the main tennis championship for the Asia/Pacific Region.

Based at the Hartnett Acceleration Centre in the Limerick Institute of Technoloy, Mark has developed a cloud-based software for facilities and property managers to better manage their maintenance, assets and contractors. While Mark is providing software to around 30 Irish and British firms, the Australian Open is the biggest event he will have ever supplied to.

He said: “One morning, I saw this email come in. It was from the Australian Open. I pounced on it straight away and rang them up.

“They were interested, and they said they would get someone to try the product out. I thought that would be end of that. But the next thing is, I was being asked to complete a due diligence document, I did that, and signed up for the annual contract for the Open to use our software.”

Mark, who employs four staff, said: “It’s a cloud based software providing intensive jobs management.”

Feeding into a central team, it allows jobs to be assigned out to teams deployed on large-scale events, or in small to medium sized firms.

“It’s a very important software. Before they were doing it [assigning maintenance jobs] via phone calls and texts, and logging jobs onto spreadsheets. This makes it a lot easier for them to organise jobs and see what is going on,” Mark told Leader Business.

Trackplan also provides software to the Baltic Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Kingfisher Gyms in Galway, the Limerick Institute of Technology, Foyle Foods, which has six plants across Ulster, and an American food firm.​

“We are also close to getting oil refinery in Nigeria,” he said. “It’s a mid-tier product. Our sweet spot is small to medium sized organisations. Some companies would be too small to get benefit from it. So they need to be big enough to get benefit.”

Excitingly, he is in early talks with one of the supply firms to the Longford Center Parcs development.