Sydney firm Cloud Awakening is hoping to build a network of partners for what it claims is the first physical asset management add-on in the world for the Xero accounting platform.
While there are hundreds of add-ons for Xero, founder and chief executive Chris Petersen claims to have discovered a gap in the marketplace for his firm’s Asset-Guru product targeted at small to medium businesses.
“No-one's gone down that path yet. There’s payroll solutions - there’s a marketplace of literally hundreds of apps, but there’s nothing in the field or physical asset management space yet,” he said.
While Petersen cited the likes of IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft as players in the enterprise asset management space, he said the smaller business market was a different story.
“Even though so many companies are doing so, so well with cloud, a lot of Australian businesses, big or small, are still stuck on Excel spreadsheets. The clichéd phrase is follow the paper trail and that’s what I’ve tried to do.”
Less than a year old, the firm has the ambitious goal of achieving “what Xero has done for accounting and Salesforce.com has done for CRM”.
The product is accessible from a web browser and will also be available through the Xero add-on marketplace. A tablet version is also coming.
Petersen said accountants and quantity surveyors will be the company’s channel partners. He said the company also hoped to take the product into the US and UK markets.
Despite competition outside the Xero marketplace, Petersen argued that the interfaces of many applications were “archaic”, or offered asset management as part of a larger barcoding system.
“The days of barcoding are very much gone,” Petersen argued. “I’ve got my ears open about iBeacon. There’s a debate going on as to what’s the best way to manage an asset.”
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