Case Study - Appen (NSW)

Appen Pty Ltd
Inaugural Winner of the 2008 Prime Minister's Australian Exporter of the Year Award
Winner, 2008 Information and Communication Technology Award

Winner:

Finalist:

Appen was selected by the Prime Minister as the overall winner from the 13 Award category winners, for their outstanding achievement by an individual Australian enterprise in international business.

Appen is the world's leading commercial provider of sophisticated text speech and language resources.

Most automated call-centres worldwide and a large proportion of the world's mobile phones contain Appen technology.

Other applications include in-car voice-controlled navigation systems, intelligence applications such as speaker identification, forensic analysis of electronic documents and hand-held speech-to-speech translation devices, as used by the US military.

A privately owned company based in New South Wales, Appen has operations in seven countries, exports 98 per cent of its products and services, and increased the volume of its exports by 50 per cent over the past year.

Appen dominates its niche and is the clear market leader in terms of scale, scope and global covers of languages, its products and services are used widely by the speech technology industry and are acknowledged as the world's gold standard for innovation, effectiveness, cost-competitiveness and speed of delivery.

Appen has a strong record in providing customised solutions for clients with complex and novel language resource requirements such as tailoring multi-language database development programs that address language, content and data volume dynamically.

The company has an enviable commercial client list of well-known companies around the world including Alcatel, Carnegie Mellon, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Noka, Nortel, Nexidia, Siemens, Sony, SRI International, Telstra, and Toshiba, while its non-commercial clients include the USA, UK and Australian governments.

Appen employs a team of 150 highly qualified professionals in linguistics, computer science and engineering, as well as in marketing, project management and finance and accounting.  "Our people are energetic, creative, practical, and results oriented," said Mr Vonwiller, Joint CEO, "and our values include dedication to our customers' needs, multiculturalism and workplace enjoyment".