Local company LeapThought is piggybacking on government’s drive to the cloud and offering local authorities a suite of software-as-a-service products. Collectively branded as CitiZen, these have been developed with the participation of the Rotorua District Council and Hamilton City Council.
CitiZen was previewed at the ALGIM local government information management conference earlier this month. It uses the cloud services of Revera, one of the three providers for central government’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) framework.
LeapThought is “dealing directly with the DIA”, says Aaron Ward, the company’s general manager of products and innovation.
The Rotorua and Hamilton councils are the first two users of the platform ,which will go live during the next month,” Ward says. “In that sense, the product has been developed by councils for councils.”
The DIA, by evaluating and selecting vendors for IaaS and other ICT services “has simplified the path to all-of-government cloud computing and enabled local innovation right across the value chain,” LeapThought CEO Ratnakar Garikipat says.
“CitiZen will bring significant efficiency and customer experience gains to local government and, through our partnership with Revera, it conforms to the government’s infrastructure and compliance requirements like data sovereignty.”
A specification sheet forwarded to Computerworld lists nine current applications modules, but Ward has asked us not to publicise them yet, as the repertoire has not been finalised. Interfaces are specified to link users through a web portal, mobile devices, SMS and an API.
LeapThought has offices in Auckland, Sydney and Hyderabad, India.