Getronics Products Make Gains

The year 2000 turned into another solid year for Spokane’s Getronics site.

The company’s software developers and researchers saw their two key products gain ground in the competitive financial services market.

The year’s largest sale was a contract to provide the software suite Globalfs to the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited.

Globalfs - short for “global financial services” - is a software platform created at Getronics’ Liberty Lake site. It’s used in banks and credit unions as a sophisticated set of tools for linking information and account databases.

The 10-year contract to the Australia and New Zealand group is the largest to date for Getronics, which is headquartered in Amsterdam and has offices in 40 countries.

Terms of the contract were not disclosed.

Getronics’ other key financial services software, Mosaic OA, was selected recently by FirstBank Puerto Rico as its primary retail services product.

Getronics R&D workers at Liberty Lake developed and continue to refine both Mosaic OA and Globalfs.

Getronics officials said the company’s financial services group accounts for about 35 percent of the corporation’s revenue. The remainder comes from providing customer support services, consulting, and designing and managing corporate or government networks.

Getronics has about 270 workers at the Liberty Lake site. About 60 are in research and development; the other 210 provide customer support, technical writing and network services, said Leni Selvaggio, marketing director of Getronics’ financial services area.

With four name and ownership changes in six years, the Liberty Lake operation’s focus on research and development has been solidified in the past year, Selvaggio said.

“Most people (in the Spokane area) don’t really know what we do out here,” said Selvaggio.

The whirl of corporate ownership changes didn’t help establish a clear community image, either.

Getronics’ 300,000-square-foot building was originally the headquarters for ISC Corp., a cutting-edge automated bank teller equipment company in this area in the 1980s.

In 1989, ISC President Gary Norton sold the company - which at one time employed more than 1,000 area workers.

Through a dizzying series of ownership changes, the Liberty Lake plant was known as ISC-Bunker Ramo, then Olivetti North America, followed by Olsy North America.

In 1998 it became Wang Global, and then, in 1999, Getronics.