Finding the right partners is often the best way to grow and compete both locally and globally, as Accreon has learned

The seeds of a good idea can come from the most unlikely places. Take Accreon, for example. The Fredericton-based IT consulting and software-development company is less than two years old and is already becoming a major player in the industry, but its origins stretch back over 20 years and 14 time zones.

In 1988 Trevor Cookson was a 24-year-old computer-programming graduate from the New Brunswick Community College’s Saint John campus when he and his friend Norman Couturier founded Evention Technologies in Fredericton to create IT workflow solutions. Within a year the pair left the city for a working holiday in Australia.

Most young Canadians in their situation end up slinging drinks in bars, shearing sheep in the Outback, or picking grapes in wine country. Instead, Cookson and Couturier consulted at Price Waterhouse where they developed a computer application for the New South Wales Lottery Corporation to manage over $1,000,000,000 of horse, dog, and harness-racing wagers. “We were given massive jobs, with the type of responsibility that anyone else right now, at the age of 42, would just be starting to think about,” says Cookson. “Heading up a multimillion-dollar project like that gave us a real edge when we came back to Canada.”

It wasn’t long before the pair was lured back home. RBC learned of their success in Australia and hired them to develop an application for managing the information needed to make personnel compliance reports to the Investment Dealers Association. Making sure he kept the rights to the technology, Cookson then licensed it to every chartered bank in the country except one, establishing the industry standard. “Working with large customers was critical for keeping the Evention staff going back home,” says Cookson about the 30 Fredericton-based software developers and support personnel he kept afloat from his Toronto office.

It’s safe to say that what Cookson considers a large customer is a behemoth to most of the province’s IT firms—customers such as Open Text Corporation (TSX: OTC) and U.S. extended care giant Omnicare (NYSE: OCR), which both hired Evention to develop what have since become globally used applications.

In 2003 OpenText bought the product that was developed for RBC, and the customer base,  for both the U.S. and Canada. “It was the post-Enron meltdown in the U.S. and the introduction of the Sarbannes-Oxley legislation that eventually took the product to an entirely new level,” says Cookson. That’s when Cookson decided to turn his attention slightly from the world of finance to health care. He and Couturier developed one of the first doctor-to-pharmacy-to-bedside automated medication-management systems for nursing homes and other health care facilities. Called Vicura, it became so successful that Omnicare bought it in 2006, to use in more than 9,000 of its extended health care facilities.

Cookson spent 10 years working in Toronto, establishing the business, before deciding to move his base back to the East Coast. “I would fly to Fredericton on the weekends, play with my kids, and fly right back again,” he says. “I ultimately decided that I wanted to be here and continue to grow my company from here.” But when he moved back in 2004, he knew that if he was going to grow the company and compete globally, he would have to raise his game and create a critical mass of talent.

At the time, Evention was doing 95% of its business outside Atlantic Canada. “I went to Al MacDonald, from the Redcliffe Group, for advice about how I could further grow my company here,” says Cookson, “and found out he was looking for a way to bring local players together into one end-to-end provider.” While there were many good companies in New Brunswick, most weren’t big enough to take on, or even outsource, $10 million-plus projects. So Cookson and MacDonald set out to find a third company to bring into the mix and discovered Advansys.

Stocked with some of the most celebrated project managers in the province, the company had advanced expertise in health care and provided consulting services to New Brunswick’s Department of Health. “Evention had a small number of very large customers, and Advansys had a larger number of smaller customers,” says Cookson. “With Redcliffe onboard, it made sense that we came together.”

The three companies formed Accreon in January of 2008 with a staff of 56 people. By that summer the company was in full swing in both the heath care and financial services sectors—so much so that the partners decided to give the critical mass another boost last September by acquiring Isomni, a Fredericton-based company specializing in technologies that manage and improve health care wait times. The move expanded Accreon to 90 people and provided Isomni’s technology with the backing to enter the international market.

Cookson says the lower cost of living in New Brunswick, the dollar’s exchange rate, and Canada’s close trading relationship with the U.S. give the region an edge that distant countries such as India can’t duplicate, despite the size and low costs of its labour force. “If I look at sustainability and exporting our minds, New Brunswick is a great place to be for ‘near-shoring’ opportunities and making products in a living lab,” he says.

Accreon’s workforce now stands at just over 100—it nearly doubled in its first year—and there are plans to triple to 300 employees by the end of 2012. “To be successful and grow in this industry, especially in Atlantic Canada, you’ve got to have a critical mass,” says Cookson. “Since no one—no agencies or governments—are really doing anything more than talking about it, we’ll have to take action ourselves. The industry has to take responsibility for itself. It’s the right way.”