TechEd 2009

Start-up highlight at TechEd 2009

(Computerworld September 2009)

Five start-ups put themselves in the spotlight at this year’s conference and pitched for the ICT innovators contest.

Two companies are from the e-centre at Massey University, Albany.

Centeros CEO James Crossley.
www.centeros.com
e-centre Virtual Resident
Centeros makes software to manage datacentres.
The software manages the physical aspects of the datacentre and delivers a centralised place to access data and make decisions quickly.

The Centeros software manages and allows visualisation of power requirements, capacity planning and more to avoid outages and breaches of service level agreements, Crossley says.

It provides reporting, monitoring and workflow for the datacentre environment.

The software also helps centralise information to avoid issues of multiple files and version control in applications such as Excel and Visio and deliver a “single source of the truth”.

The interface is browser-based, platform independent and accessible over the internet, Crossley says. Customers include IAG, Healthalliance, Datacom and the University of Auckland. The next stage is to sell the software globally through resellers.

Crossley says Centeros can be run in-house or as software as a service.

KernMobile, Director Kerry Connors
www.kernmobile.com
e-centre Resident Company, with a vision of capturing works information targeting councils, utilities and contractors. The problem it addresses is “rigid mobility”, reducing the visibility of current works under way with each being recorded in separate systems and recorded multiple times. Many organisations have five or more staff simply entering data from paper forms with no business rules attached.

KernMobile is delivered in two parts: a mobile solution or device and an internet management console controlling information flows out into the field and back into in-house databases.

While the software cuts duplicated data entry and boosts efficiency, the main benefit is vastly improved visibility of what is going on in the field, Connors says.

KernMobile is built on Microsoft.Net and, like Centeros, is also available as SasS or as a client server application. KernMobile is on track to becoming a $2million company by 2011, Connors says.