THE HIDE FACTORY AND THE IDEA.

There is a particular kind of origin story that refuses to be romanticised away. It is too specific, too unglamorous, too grounded in the physical fact of a place. Adrian Di Marco founded TechnologyOne from inside a demountable office in the car park at JL Mactaggart Industries’ hide processing plant in Hemmant, Brisbane, in 1987. Not a garage in California. Not a converted terrace in London. A demountable. In a car park. At a hide processing plant — a facility for treating animal skins — on the industrial eastern fringe of Brisbane.

This is where one of Australia’s most consequential technology companies began. And it matters that the place is so resolutely unglamorous, because what followed was not the product of inherited infrastructure or fashionable geography. It was the product of a specific conviction, nurtured in specific soil, by a person who had looked at the same problem that every large organisation faced — the management of financial data and institutional processes — and decided that the dominant solutions were wrong.

TechnologyOne was founded by Adrian Di Marco in 1987, when he saw an opportunity to build a new generation of accounting software for businesses and government departments, using relational database technology. The insight seems modest in retrospect. It was not modest at the time. Relational databases were new. Enterprise software was dominated by systems built on older architectures. The idea that one could construct a configurable, database-driven platform — one that institutions could adapt without rewriting source code — was a genuine structural bet on where computing was going.

Di Marco made that bet from Brisbane. He has not stopped making it since.

THE PATRON AND THE PIVOT.

Adrian Di Marco started TechnologyOne in Brisbane in 1987 with $500,000 from an angel investor after struggling to find funding from traditional lending institutions. The angel investor was not a venture capital firm. Di Marco founded TechnologyOne with backing from the Mactaggart family, who have been his business partners throughout the last 35 years. Di Marco approached investors John and Dugald Mactaggart of J.L. Mactaggart Industries, a former customer, for financial backing. The relationship began, as the best business relationships often do, not with a pitch deck but with demonstrated competence. According to reporting by Computerworld, the hide factory owner had been quietly observing Di Marco’s work ethic on an earlier implementation project and liked what he saw.

Instead of altering source code for each client, the software was designed to be configured via a database, allowing for seamless updates and new features across all users on the same code base. This architectural principle — the unified code line — would prove to be the company’s most durable competitive advantage, the thing that allowed it to grow without fragmenting, to update without disrupting, to serve hundreds of organisations running on the same platform without producing hundreds of divergent products.

The company’s first product, FinanceOne, launched in 1991, was built on relational database technology, a strategic decision that aligned with industry trends. Following the release of its finance solution in 1991, the company introduced a College Administration System in 1992, which later became a widely adopted student management system for Australian universities. More specifically, according to Wikipedia’s documentation of the company’s early history, in 1992, TechnologyOne developed a student administration system called College Administration System (CAP) for TAFE Queensland, which led to the development of StudentOne (now TechnologyOne Student Management), used by Australian universities. The Queensland public sector was not merely a client. It was, in the most literal sense, the incubator.

Then came the crisis that defined the company’s character. In 1998, when Oracle launched a competitor product and revoked TechnologyOne’s licenses, Di Marco made the company’s products database independent, building its own sales, marketing, and implementation divisions. This moment deserves to be held in view for a moment. A large American company — one of the most powerful software corporations on earth — effectively pulled the rug out. The expected response, for a small Queensland technology firm, would have been to negotiate, to capitulate, to find a way back inside the licensing tent. Di Marco did the opposite. He rebuilt the foundations of the product, took on every part of the commercial chain that the company had previously outsourced, and emerged from the crisis more vertically integrated and more strategically independent than before.

It was the first of what the company would later describe as four major technology paradigm shifts that it has navigated in its history: relational databases, the personal computer era, the internet, and the cloud. Over this time, TechnologyOne has wholly rewritten its software four times to be at the forefront of successive generations of technology, all of which remains Australian. That phrase — all of which remains Australian — carries more weight than a casual reading might suggest.

THE LISTING AND THE LONG GAME.

In December 1999, Di Marco led the company into its listing on the ASX, making it one of the most successful floats of the DotCom era. The timing is worth noting. This was the peak of the technology bubble, when valuation multiples for software companies were being driven by narrative momentum rather than operational reality. TechnologyOne, by contrast, was a profitable company with real customers paying for software that ran real institutions. It listed and then, while the DotCom boom collapsed around it, kept growing.

From 1999 to 2019, TechnologyOne doubled in size every five years. That is a compound growth rate sustained across two decades, through the DotCom bust, through the Global Financial Crisis, through the rise and disruption of cloud computing. It is a record that speaks less to fortune than to structural discipline — the kind of discipline that comes from having a clear theory of what you are building and refusing to be diverted from it.

In 2010, TechnologyOne moved into its new $12 million headquarters in Brisbane, which included what was at the time the largest Australian-owned research and development facility. The building sits in Fortitude Valley, the inner-city precinct of Brisbane that has, over the past two decades, become a significant hub for the city’s creative and knowledge industries. Located in the inner city entertainment precinct of Fortitude Valley, the new TechnologyOne headquarters is a Six Green Star rated building that spans across 6,700 square feet and accommodates more than 400 staff. Di Marco’s reasoning for remaining in Brisbane was characteristically direct. As reported by iTnews at the time of the R&D centre’s opening, he stated: “Brisbane has so many advantages. We saw no reason to move to Silicon Valley, Europe or India to compete on the international stage.”

That decision — to anchor the company’s intellectual property and its people in Queensland rather than follow the usual gravity toward American or European headquarters — is itself a kind of civic statement. Since the late 1990s, a more typical path for successful Australian technology businesses has been to either move their domicile overseas before public listing — usually to the US — or to be wholly acquired by an overseas technology business — again, most often from the US. TechnologyOne did neither. Its research, its leadership, and its legal domicile have remained in Brisbane.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF STAYING.

The decision to stay deserves more analytical attention than it typically receives in discussions of Australian technology policy. It is not simply a matter of sentiment or provincial loyalty. It reflects a considered view about competitive strategy, about the nature of expertise, and about the relationship between an institution and the communities it serves.

Di Marco founded TechnologyOne in 1987, to build ERP software based on new and emerging technologies, that was configurable and did not require software customisation. That founding principle — configurability without customisation — is, in essence, a theory of institutional diversity. The organisations that use TechnologyOne software — local councils, universities, hospital systems, government agencies — are not identical. They have different governance structures, different policy environments, different data histories. A software platform that required each of them to customise bespoke code would produce fragmentation, cost, and dependence on specialist integrators. A configurable platform, by contrast, allows institutional diversity to coexist within a common technical infrastructure.

TechnologyOne continues to reinvest approximately 20% of its revenue in R&D annually. As of June 2019, the company had invested more than $500 million into research and development since its inception. That is not a small number for a company of its scale, and the reinvestment rate has continued. The research and development apparatus that makes this possible is concentrated in Fortitude Valley. The vast majority of TechnologyOne’s R&D spend is in Australia, most of it in the R&D centre located at the Fortitude Valley Brisbane head office.

The Queensland ecosystem, in other words, is not merely the origin of this company. It is the ongoing site of its intellectual production. The software that runs councils across New Zealand, that manages student enrolments for universities in the United Kingdom, that tracks infrastructure assets across the Pacific — much of that software is conceived and written in Brisbane.

Di Marco is a founding member of Software Queensland, a group promoting the Queensland software industry. His participation in that organisation reflects an understanding that the success of a single company, however significant, is not the same as the development of an ecosystem. The two things require each other. The ecosystem provides talent, institutions, and network density. The company provides proof of concept — evidence that it is possible to build large, enduring, globally competitive software businesses in Queensland and to keep them there.

THE TRANSITION AND THE SUCCESSOR.

When he stepped down as CEO in May 2017, Di Marco was one of the longest-serving chief executives of an ASX-listed company. Thirty years at the helm of a publicly listed technology company is, by any measure, an unusual tenure. The tenure is even more significant when considered against the backdrop of the structural transformations the company navigated during that period — from client-server architecture to internet-based systems, from on-premises software to cloud delivery, from a single-product accounting vendor to a full enterprise resource planning suite serving six distinct market verticals.

In May 2017, Di Marco stepped down as CEO but remained as Executive Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer. In February 2022, he announced he would be stepping down as TechnologyOne’s executive chairman after 35 years with the company, with his resignation effective on 30 June. TechnologyOne deputy chair Pat O’Sullivan succeeded Di Marco’s role as non-executive chair.

The transition had been long in preparation. Di Marco described the announcement as “the final step of a carefully planned transition that started with the appointment of our long service COO, Edward Chung, to the role of CEO in 2017, the renewal of our board over the past five years and the recruitment of a very experienced deputy chair.” That carefulness — the refusal to treat succession as an afterthought — is consistent with the broader philosophy that has characterised the company’s development. Growth that is not accompanied by institutional continuity is not growth. It is risk.

Edward Chung’s stewardship has continued in the same disciplined register. As of October 2024, the company had posted 15 consecutive years of record annual profit. In November 2010, TechnologyOne announced it would make its software available on the cloud, and invested heavily in research and development to transition its software functionalities into the cloud, spending $150 million to develop its software-as-a-service cloud products. That cloud transition — executed without disrupting customers or breaking the company’s profit growth — is itself a structural achievement. TechnologyOne has claimed that no other ERP company in the world transitioned without impacting its customers and/or its profit growth.

THE SCALE OF WHAT WAS BUILT.

It is worth pausing on the current dimensions of the institution that began in a car park in Hemmant.

Over 73% of Australian and New Zealand residents live in a council powered by TechnologyOne software. That figure is remarkable. It means that the software built and maintained in Brisbane underlies the administrative infrastructure of the majority of local government across two nations — rates notices, planning applications, asset registers, payroll systems. The ordinary machinery of civic life, running on Queensland-built code.

TechnologyOne empowers over 6.5 million students globally, mobilising over 60 per cent of higher education in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom through its SaaS ERP solution, OneEducation. Trusted by more than 230 government departments and agencies, TechnologyOne’s OneGovernment SaaS ERP solution supports the day-to-day operations and strategic requirements of state, territory, federal and central governments in Australia and New Zealand.

In fiscal year 2025, TechnologyOne’s revenue was $598.50 million, an increase of 18.37% compared to the previous year’s $505.60 million. Australian enterprise software company TechnologyOne has been admitted to the S&P/ASX 50 index, cementing its position among the nation’s most influential listed companies, standing alongside names such as BHP and the Commonwealth Bank. The milestone came 38 years after TechnologyOne’s founding and reflects its sustained expansion and market prominence.

This trajectory — from a demountable in a car park to the ASX 50 — is not the result of a single breakthrough or a fortunate acquisition. It is the result of something quieter and more durable: a consistent theory of what software should do for institutions, applied with discipline across nearly four decades, in the same city, by the same people.

As TechnologyOne itself has noted, the question of how Australia builds enduring sovereign capability in technology is one that its own story raises. The company has not moved. Its intellectual property has not been acquired by an American conglomerate. Its headquarters remain on Wickham Street, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Queensland. That fact is, in the context of the Australian technology sector, genuinely unusual. It represents a form of civic commitment that goes beyond rhetoric.

"Brisbane's technology industry is worth billions to the city and state, employing thousands of people. The city is a breeding ground for some of the world's most innovative individuals and cutting edge companies."

That observation, attributed to Di Marco upon receiving the Lord Mayor’s Business Person of the Year award, is not a boast. It is a statement of civic aspiration — and a challenge to those who would assume that technology of consequence can only be built elsewhere.

PERMANENCE AND THE ONCHAIN ADDRESS.

What does it mean for a company to belong to a place? The question is less straightforward than it appears. Companies change ownership. Headquarters move. Brands are acquired and dissolved. The legal entity called TechnologyOne Limited might, at some future point, wear a different name or carry a different flag. But the story of what was built here — in Queensland, from nothing, against the gravitational pull of larger markets — belongs to this geography in a way that no corporate transaction can fully extinguish.

The Queensland Foundation’s digital naming infrastructure addresses exactly this problem. In an onchain identity layer where records are permanent and not subject to renewal cycles or corporate reversals, a namespace like technologyone.queensland functions as something more than a web address. It functions as a civic coordinate — a durable marker of the institutional fact that TechnologyOne was built here, belongs to this story, and is part of the permanent record of what Queensland has produced.

This is not a technical claim about browser resolution or wallet infrastructure. It is a claim about the nature of identity over time. Physical places have addresses. Historical events have dates. Institutions that shape the life of a city and a state deserve coordinates that reflect their civic significance — coordinates that do not expire when a domain registration lapses or when a company changes its branding.

The story of Adrian Di Marco and TechnologyOne is, at its core, a story about the refusal of a particular kind of impermanence. The refusal to move headquarters to where capital is easier to access. The refusal to let the Oracle crisis extinguish the enterprise. The refusal to treat the cloud transition as an excuse to break what was working. The refusal to allow a succession of leadership to become a rupture in institutional continuity. In each of these moments, the choice was for durability — for the proposition that what is built carefully and maintained honestly can outlast the disruptions that destroy less considered institutions.

technologyone.queensland is the onchain articulation of that same proposition: that a company of this significance, rooted in this place, deserves a permanent civic address in the digital record. Not as a commercial asset to be bought and sold, but as a piece of the infrastructure of Queensland’s institutional memory — a record that says, verifiably and permanently, that this is where it came from, and this is what it became.

That the story begins in a car park in Hemmant and ends — for now — in the ASX 50, with software running under the administration of most of the local governments in Australia and New Zealand, and with the research and development apparatus still anchored in Fortitude Valley, is a civic fact of some consequence. Queensland has produced, in TechnologyOne, an institution that is genuinely large, genuinely sovereign, and genuinely here. The permanence of that fact deserves a permanent address.