The Australian Software That Helped Create a US$10 Billion Market
Infra Corporation | Consensus Software Award Winner 2005
When Infra Corporation won a Consensus Software Award in 2005, it was already helping redefine how enterprise IT was managed.
Its flagship platform, infraEnterprise, was one of the world's leading IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, enabling organisations to manage increasingly complex technology environments through a single, fully integrated platform.
Built around internationally recognised ITIL best practices, infraEnterprise helped organisations automate incident management, change management, configuration management, problem management, release management and service delivery—providing businesses with greater visibility, improved operational efficiency and higher levels of service performance.
At a time when organisations around the world were becoming increasingly dependent on technology, Infra Corporation was developing software that helped IT departments move from reactive support to proactive service management.
The Consensus Awards recognised Infra Corporation for its innovation, technical excellence and outstanding commercial potential.
It would prove to be a company well ahead of its time.
Over the following years, infraEnterprise established itself as one of the market's leading IT Service Management platforms, earning customers across government, financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and enterprise organisations around the world.
Its success soon attracted the attention of one of the world's largest technology companies.
In March 2008, EMC Corporation acquired Infra Corporation as part of its strategy to expand beyond enterprise storage and build a comprehensive enterprise software portfolio.
EMC described Infra as a market-leading provider of IT Service Management software, with the acquisition playing a key role in its vision to deliver intelligent, automated data centre operations through what it called Closed-Loop Service Orchestration.
The acquisition significantly strengthened EMC's enterprise software capabilities while positioning the company to compete in what it identified as a US$10 billion global IT Service Management market.
For EMC, Infra's Australian-developed technology became a cornerstone of its expanding software business.
The journey didn't end there.
When VMware later acquired EMC's enterprise software portfolio, infraEnterprise evolved into VMware Service Manager, continuing to support organisations around the world with enterprise-grade service management capabilities.
Today, the technology lives on through Alemba's vFire platform, where the innovation originally developed by Infra Corporation continues to help organisations modernise IT operations, automate workflows and improve service delivery nearly two decades after receiving a Consensus Award.
Very few software platforms remain relevant through multiple generations of technology.
Even fewer continue evolving through several of the world's largest technology organisations while remaining trusted by enterprise customers around the globe.
For Consensus, Infra Corporation represents exactly the type of company the Awards were established to identify—organisations developing innovative technology with the vision, engineering excellence and commercial potential to create lasting global impact.
Long before one of the world's largest technology companies recognised its value, Consensus had already done so.
Infra's journey demonstrates that Australian software doesn't simply compete on the world stage—it can influence how the world's largest technology companies build their future.
More than twenty years after winning a Consensus Software Award, the innovation behind infraEnterprise continues to live on, proving that great software isn't measured by headlines, but by the problems it continues to solve.