From the CEO’s desk: 2024 recap and looking to 2025

As 2024 draws to a close, Alison Atkins, acQuire CEO, sits down to reflect on the achievements and events that have shaped the past 12 months for the global information management software company. From releasing new product features to enhancing security measures and acquiring a new company, acQuire has continued to innovate and evolve to better suit the needs of customers and partners.  

Here’s what Alison had to say about the year that’s passed and what’s to come in 2025: 

Last year you used the word ‘change’ to describe 2023. How would you describe 2024 in one word? 

There’s still change, but it’s now about consolidating change, so my word this year: growth.  

We have acquired a number of businesses in the past few years, so most of 2024 was continuing to embed the EnviroSys, Insite, Global Tenements and more recently, BlackFox teams into acQuire and looking at product and team growth. We have also focused on providing support where needed to our standalone sister company, Spatial Dimension. 

2024 has been a year of researching and developing additional products and solutions to bring to the market and we’re excited for what’s to come in 2025. 

You’ve headed to a number of industry events this year from PDAC in Toronto, to IMARC in Sydney, as well as hosting the acQuire Connect Tech Summit. Based on your interactions with peers, colleagues and customers, what role do you see technology and data playing in the future of the mining industry? 

We know the mining industry is cyclical so this year we’ve seen shifts in commodity prices which have affected how some companies operate. But at the fore of many conversations and presentations around this is the importance of maintaining data quality.  

With the increasing volume and complexity of data being collected, it’s crucial that companies can trust the quality of their data to help them make more confident decisions as they explore deeper and more complex ore bodies. 

But it’s not just in mining that we’re seeing data quality as a theme. We’re seeing the same conversations around environmental and social performance data. Companies are expected, and quite often required, to share how they’re collecting data, who they’re engaging with, the diversity within their organisations, and their impact on others . 

With the increasing focus on environmental stewardship in the mining and resources sector, as highlighted in EY’s ‘Top 10 business risks and opportunities for the mining and metals in 2025’ report, and more stringent environmental reporting and regulatory standards coming in, what steps should companies take to ensure they are meeting these new requirements? 

The first step is understanding what the current, and future, requirements and reporting standards are for your company . This ensures companies can confidently capture the right information in the most suitable solution, and report on it effectively. 

Different countries have different requirements and timeframes for reporting. There is also different tiered reporting structures based on the size of organisations, not just in mining but across all industries. It comes down to being really clear on: 

• what compliance checks are required for your particular company,  

• identifying the best way to report on this, and then  

• looking at the quality of the information you have at hand and identifying any additional information you need.  

At this point, you can then look for a solution to assist and enable that reporting is done in a cost and time effective way. By understanding their requirements, the data they have and the solution to report with, companies can have confidence to make the best decisions. 

And do you think that it’s becoming more important to be transparent about that to communities?  

Absolutely. There’s a shift in shareholder sentiment that they are investing in organisations that are more transparent and operate more ethically as well.  

We hear the term “green washing”, but there’s also green hushing and blue washing and blue hushing. These are relatively new terms, particularly hushing, in the last few years. But organisations are being more heavily scrutinised and held to account by various stakeholders, including action groups and social media. So, it’s making sure companies are doing what they say, and reporting accurately. It’s important for companies to provide transparent information for compliance, but just as important is remaining transparent in the social consciousness and community.  

We recently added BlackFox to acQuire’s suite of solutions. This new product expands acQuire’s reach further into the mining and exploration space – what opportunities does that open for acQuire? 

It allows us to effectively manage the collection of quality information at the drill rig. Whether that’s through the drilling organisations collecting that data for their customers, or mining and exploration companies collecting the information from the drilling companies, BlackFox ensures there’s consistency between the two parties and that they can have the right reporting and metrics they need to manage contracts and drilling statistics.  

This solution complements what we do within our flagship product, GIM Suite, and potentially even into the environmental sector as well. We will be looking at what we can do to leverage connectivity across our products where it’s needed by our customers.  

How important is it to acQuire to keep interoperability between the different products?  

We see this as a differentiator at acQuire. Not only do we play well with others, but we also want to ensure that the products we own, seamlessly interoperate with each other.  We want to ensure that our customers experience a seamless transfer of data between our products. 

For example, if someone’s collecting geological drilling information in GIM Suite and environmental data in EnviroSys, it’s important the two systems are talking to each other so our customers can have confidence that the flow of data is accurate, and then any changes in the data are captured correctly as well. 

This year we released GIM Suite’s REST API which assists other technology organisations to connect with our solution and provides more flexibility to our customers with how they want to access the data within the solution as well.  

What are some of acQuire’s biggest wins this year? 

A highlight for this year was hosting the acQuire Connect Tech Summit in Perth. It was wonderful to see our team bring together more than 100 people working with acQuire’s suite of solutions to share, connect and learn from one another across the two-day event. 

Being recognised as the winner of the Advanced Technologies category at the Western Australian Export Awards and then to go on to represent Western Australia at the Australian Export Awards in the same category was also fantastic. The Australian government has some great initiatives to help businesses exporting internationally, particularly around Austrade and our Australian identity, so this was also a great learning opportunity for us as well. 

acQuire also was named as a double finalist in the Large Business of the Year and Employer of the Year at the WA Business Awards. Both of these were a great recognition of our company, how we operate and the cultural frameworks we’ve put in place. 

Another big achievement undertaken by our infrastructure and systems team this year was getting ISO 27001 certified. That’s been a huge body of work, not just by our CTO and his team, but also across the entire organisation to ensure that we continue to maintain our information security standards as we grow. For us, having this certification and the information security framework is not only important for our company but provides additional confidence to our customers as well. 

Acquiring BlackFox was also a more recent and exciting win for 2024. We have started to integrate this into acQuire and are looking forward to see where we can take the solution globally. 

On top of this, we’ve had 10% growth in people this year, bringing in fresh new perspectives and ideas to acQuire. This is exciting from a succession-planning perspective because, as we’ve grown, this has opened doors for new opportunities and positions in the organisation. 

Finally, from a product perspective, we’ve had a huge year. There’s been multiple releases across our GIM Suite, EnviroSys and Insite products. It’s exciting seeing the growth in EnviroSys, acQuire’s environmental data management product that was acquired four years ago. We spent the first few years focusing on what we need to do with the team and product to enable it to operate on a global scale. We’re seeing the fruits of that now with their footprint growing exponentially, not just in Australia, but in North America, and more recently in South America.  

What are you most looking forward to in 2025?  

In the past few years, we’ve been working on a new solution that sits in the geological data management space which we’ll be launching in 2025. There’s more information to come on this but we’re pretty excited to bring this to market

Organisationally for acQuire, we’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years embedding an architecture and cultural frameworks that will support our continued growth. All going well, we will organically grow by another 25% in 2025.