From eBay to Enterprize
Not many businesses can lay claim to getting started in a cupboard, but that’s where IT company CVSDude’s founder and CEO Mark Bathie stored the $70 worth of parts he bought on eBay to build his first server.
From a low budget start up to successful global business, CVSDude has recently bagged a swag of awards, including the $100,000 prize in The University of Queensland Business School’s Enterprize competition and the Richard Joel Young Export Entrepreneur Award in the Premier of Queensland’s Export Awards.
Mark’s is a classic tale of not being able to find a service to suit his needs so he decided to create it himself. While working in London in 2001, Mark was looking for a means of collaborating safely and securely on projects online, but no such service existed. This led to the creation of CVSDude, the world’s first provider of commercial source code hosting.
CVSDude has grown to become the largest worldwide provider of hosted open-source version control systems to software developers, overcoming the obstacle of geography and enabling them to work simultaneously on projects.
“Whether team members are located in Dubai, London, Bangalore or here in Brisbane, our system effectively puts them all in the same room together,” Mark said.
When his initial customers complained that the server was too slow, Mark outsourced infrastructure to a leading US-based datacentre. It’s this commitment to continuous improvement that has attracted more than 43,000 software developers globally to the home-grown business, with over 60 per cent of CVSDude customers US-based.
CVSDude works out of the Queen-sland Government’s technology incubator i.lab at Toowong in Brisbane. “i.lab’s Anne-Marie Birkill and her fantastic team have given me key advice over the past 18 months and helped turn a good business into a proper company,” Mark said.
Mark will plough his UQ Enterprize winnings into a research and development project that will allow CVSDude to enter the lucrative enterprise Fortune 1000 market.
Story: Antoinette Bauer
Photo: UQ Business School
Last reviewed 17 December 2007
