A Christmas Tale

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the office,
email was stirring, and my inbox did fuss.

While spam was blocked by the filter with care,
Important email from Blake soon would be here.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the Christmas poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” and will forgive my shameless attempt to relate this post to Christmas.

The poem relates to a visit from Saint Nic (or Santa Claus as we know him in these southern parts). In the real life version of events, the email relates to a request for help from Blake Hayward, one of our clients. Blake is the protagonist of the tale and had an interesting problem.

Turns out the software he used, a system for managing his fleet of Coaches, kept him tied to a physical location. While it worked OK, he wanted someone to build software to allow him to manage his fleet via the cloud.

This might sound like an old problem that isn’t pertinent to today. Hey who uses software to manage things that isn’t in the cloud? Well it turns out around the world there are businesses other than multi-national giants. In New Zealand we have a country with a disproportionate number of entrepreneurs and as a consequence of this and being a smallish market, we have a lot of small and medium businesses.

Like Blake, our entrepreneurs can be very successful. Often their success is built on the use of software that possibly isn’t cloud based or doesn’t scale. Perhaps our hero even judiciously uses Excel or Access to manage processes. This works for a time and is a low cost, low risk approach even if it’s less than ideal.

When they become more successful they grow and need to scale. Or want a holiday while having some measure of visibility (or control) without being tied to the office or <insert your challenge here>.

Not surprisingly, we get a number of requests from prospective clients who ‘just need a cloud app’. And of course we can do that. But we also love surprising our clients by working with them to explore whether their ideas can also be commercialized. Maybe the way you are solving a problem could also be used to help other businesses?

Blake is the real hero of the story. A great kiwi bloke and successful entrepreneur who wanted to be able to have a holiday and still monitor and run things from the beach or another location.

And so our adventure started…