Published on the 11/11/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Cloud Awakening has opened shop, selling a cloud-based asset management solution targeted at mid-sized businesses in Australia and New Zealand, plugging what it considers a major market hole…
The company’s founder and chief executive Chris Petersen currently has a staff of three in Sydney and a team of five contract developers in the UK – but he has major ambitions for his cloud-based system, Asset Guru.
The service is hosted on Amazon Web Services out of the UK which is “part of the grand world domination plan,” quipped Petersen, although the first sales targets will be the Australian and New Zealand markets, with a UK push to follow.
The service is being sold directly and through Xero’s add-on marketplace, and marketed directly to accountants and book-keepers. These are the professionals in small and medium enterprises charged with managing increasingly complex depreciation schedules. Petersen said that there is a gap in the market for asset management systems with most suppliers focused heavily on meeting the needs of large scale enterprise customers.
He said that SMEs also needed a clearer understanding of the value of their assets in order to ensure they had the right financing and insurance in place to protect and grow the asset base. Asset Guru is intended to offer a step up from the Excel spreadsheet approach to asset management which he said was common in SMEs.
Three versions of the system are available – an enterprise version that can track up to 80,000 assets for $179 a month, scaling down through $79 and $49 a month versions for smaller businesses with fewer assets.
While the initial integration is with Xero’s accounting platform, Petersen says other integrations will be considered but that he will be guided by the market as to which is the most important, canvassing SAP, NetSuite, MYOB and Reckon as the most likely next cabs off the rank.
Petersen also has ambitions to extend the system to be able to cope with the significant scaling of assets which is likely to occur as organisations deploy internet of things solutions. The system would help answer issues such as, “How do you make sense of that for small business? How do you handle maintenance?” he said.
