Both Visean and Medtamic have received assistance under the Australian Government's A$122 million ICT Incubators program, which Coonan administers. This provides capital, mentoring and administrative support for emerging start-ups.

Victoria University's Center for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES) software industry report for 2004 concluded Australia's trade deficit for software products was A$444 million and for royalties and fees was A$325 million, making a total of A$769 million.

CSES Fellow, Professor John Houghton is compiling the ACS ICT Trade Update report for 2005, but said it won't be available until mid-June.

"There are lots of caveats to keep in mind," Houghton said. "The gold master problem - where a firm imports a master and copies it here - is significant, as is software sold pre-installed on computers, and so the numbers tend to understate imports by quite a bit."

Houghton praised Coonan's efforts to raise the profile of Australian software, but believes the capabilities of local vendors is undervalued domestically. "People buy American rather than local, [so] a little bit more encouragement locally would be a big help," he said. "It's hard to go from nothing to exporting to Washington."