Ann: Trading Halt, page-17

Just my take on things with Zyber.

Zyber is positioning itself (at this stage) as a business solution exclusively. That makes sense considering its security and collaboration features, and therefore makes the comparison with Dropbox and OneDrive (on their website) irrelevant and even detrimental. I would compare it loosely to the Lotus Notes (collaborative and secure client-server platform) of the good old days. It can become a leader (like Notes was in its days) or just struggle along. I say struggle along because there are many companies out there, like Zyber, most are private companies trying to become leaders. Some are actually more advanced or better recognised (like Databox or Egnyte).

On an operational level, Zyber needs to clean up their act and be more commercially focused, getting out of the red and starting to collect some serious revenues. They should also improve their general communication and product promotion, the ASX is not a marketing platform and I see very little public communication from Zyber. That would take some time to fix and, I suspect, some internal changes. Ideally, the company they are considering investing in should target those deficiencies and maybe help them expand their product offering as well.

Obviously Zyber is not going to invest in a company that does exactly the same business, unless that company has an added value that complements or enhances the Zyber product offering, business operation, and/or business strategy.

The question therefore is what are the companies that fit that description?  Once we eliminated the public companies, the big players, i.e. beyond Zyber's reach (and we are talking here about "investment" not "agreement"), and the ones that do exactly the same thing with no significant difference, the remaining list is pretty short actually.

I could think of three private companies that could fit an investment scenario, namely Webvault, EzyVault, and Emerging IT.  There are others of course (like Aquion or MSP Blueshift) but they have a less likely fit.

1.  Webvault could offer Zyber a low end solution (small business and consumer oriented) as well as advanced data centre facilities, a framework for growth. They also have a reseller network that may help improve the marketing aspects. The fact that they are based in Perth makes it the most likely candidate.

2. EzyVault could complement Zyber's business solutions with end-user oriented solutions, covering both the corporate and consumer segments.

3. Emerging IT has as part of its business a secure cloud-based file sharing solution, but offers as well many other services that could be valued by a potential Zyber customer, such as Managed IT Services. Most likely, the value of Emerging IT would be its consulting and advisory services, something that is seemingly lacking at Zyber.

Lets hope that the investment Zyber intends to make, whatever it may be, will help the company improve and grow and see its shareholders rewarded in a big way

Cheers!