By Owen Ferguson

Axia NetMedia Corp. could quite easily be the poster child for successful Canadian businesses.

In just five years, the company, which produces proprietary Internet-based content services, has grown from $200,000 in revenue to $60 million for the last fiscal year. That's even more impressive if one considers what the company does, and who runs it.

Axia is a strange brew consisting of several, rather disparate divisions. One installs high-speed computer networks. A second produces educational software for the Internet. A third provides a variety of media development services, such as Web page production. And co-ordinating these different arms is Art Price, a 48-year-old former oil company CEO who, with graying hair and a penchant for plaid shirts, doesn't look like your average dot-com executive.

Price took over educational software company Axia Multimedia Ltd. in 1995, investing $500,000 of his own money and merging it with Cable Systems International Ltd., a network installation company that focused on the enterprise market. Price then took the new, larger company public on the Alberta Stock Exchange.

Since then, the company took over a number of other, smaller companies, including public relations and marketing firms, and Toronto-based networking company Netricom Inc.

This rather disparate group of acquisitions has kept many analysts guessing as to what the company's actual aim is. "It really looks like a holding company," says Brian Pow of Acumen Capital Finance Partners Ltd. in Calgary.

But not everyone is mystified by the company's apparent lack of focus. U.S. networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. has stated publicly that it understands perfectly what Price is up to, and that it wants to get involved. To that end, the two companies have formed a partnership that will include joint product development and marketing.

So what, exactly, is Axia doing that's got Cisco so interested? "What we do is high-end intelligence online solutions that are Internet protocol-based," says Price. "We target a particular customer group that has a need for a dynamic online knowledge solution, and then we provide that through an online Internet protocol-based network."

Essentially, the company creates "alternative Internet environments" — communities for distributing information over the Internet that use the available protocols in different ways. Communities created by Axia can't be accessed via a regular Web browser — rather, they use a proprietary interface (designed by Axia) on the client end to access proprietary information (created, assembled, organized and hosted by Axia) on the server end, all using existing Internet technology.

According to Price, that's what makes his company special — the fact that they can deliver solutions that aren't forced into the "forward-backward, text-based search" paradigm of the traditional Web browser interface. "It's a dedicated interface that's designed for that customer group, not a standard browser space. It's not a generic navigational search type concept. It's a sophisticated custom-designed application for that type of environment," he says. This offers customers the option, for example, of creating a data system that's browsable in many different dimensions using a simple custom graphical interface. Think about a Web browser with Up, Down, Left, Right, In and Out buttons in addition to forward and back ones, and you'll have some idea of the type of solutions that Axia can provide.

Price says only a company with as many apparently disparate holdings and divisions as Axia would have the resources to give the type of end-to-end information network solutions that his customers demand. The company's strength lies in its ability to do many different things and do them all coordinated under a single company banner.

"We do the application development, content and media development. We create the knowledge interface that allows the user to focus on the changing knowledge in their space, and we host it — put it on the Internet backbone and make it available to them," says Price, explaining his company's capabilities.

Recently, Axia has partnered with the Mayo Clinic to create the subscription-based online Global Center for Knowledge in Neurology.