Changing of the guard at ASI Solutions

ASI Solutions founder and director, Maree Lowe, will step back from everyday operations of the business.

Her responsibilities will now be shared by general manager, Nathan Lowe, national sales manager, Jason King, and national marketing manager, Linda Hatzidis.

“It’s a significant change,” Lowe said. “Being a private company, you’ve always got to look at how to do things smarter.

“I’m still sitting behind the scenes, always on every email but I hate to admit when I go to functions, I’m the oldest one there and I remember when I was the youngest.”

King was promoted to national sales manager role in June. He was previously the northern region sales manager.

Creating this national position will help drive more uniformity across the company, Lowe said.

Lowe, along with her husband Ken, started the family-oriented business in 1985 trading as Anabelle Bits.

Over the years the company grew significantly to more than 170 staff with its main office in Sydney, and branches in ACT, Victoria, Queensland, SA and WA.

Being a technology-based company, means keeping up with the pace of evolving technologies in the marketplace. In 2015, ASI’s focus involves managed services, security, software subscription models through its vendors such as Brocade, and managing the sprawl of mobile devices and data analytics.

“We’ve got to continuously evaluate where we’re up to because if we’re not ahead, then our customers won’t be,” Lowe said. “We can’t be all things to everybody, but as a company, we have to keep continually changing. We’re trying to pick out what we need as a business and what we feel is right for our customers.

"Managed services has continually be re-thought, what elements you want to do, what you don’t want to be in and how to choose a winner. It’s obvious right now with mobility and security.”

Nathan Lowe said the company was gaining some good traction within the managed services market.

“If you’re not looking at services or managed services, then you’re probably behind the ball,” he said.

Hatzidis claimed a big growth area for the company was within the mobile device management (MDM) space.

“We’re all using something that’s connected to our business systems. The one standout is IT risk assessment,” she said.

“It’s not until something happens that a customer will do an IT risk assessment and start taking MDM more seriously.”

Beyond ASI Solutions, the Lowes also have investments in other companies including Verso Learning (Verso App), Canberra Data Centres, Top Image Systems (TIS) Australia and Learnology.

In the past six months, Nathan Lowe has been working on setting up TIS, which previously sat under ASI’s umbrella.

“Within ASI we’re evolving other technologies and services. Having TIS sit within ASI, we noticed two distinct sales teams and that was a good reason for its own set up,” he said.

TIS provides a document capture software called eFlow, which aims to improve an organisation’s paperwork system and provide employee efficiencies. The software can also be customised to suit an organisation’s requirements.

“It’s focused on business process outsourcing and it’s a good fit for the financial market,” Lowe said. “We’ve been doing this software since 2000, and we’ve had some big wins particularly within the government space as well as other markets. We’re looking for some good growth in 2015 and we’re in the early stages of development for mobile device capture.”

Verso App is another company that the Lowes have shares in. The education software focuses on collaboration in the classroom.

Verso CEO, Colin Woods, is based in Melbourne, but is constantly in the US due to the growing interest of companies looking into the software and wanting to develop it further under their own guise.

“It’s been a fairly lengthy take-up in Australia, but we’re also looking at the US at the moment because there’s a lot of interest in companies wanting to OEM it, which we will allow,” Lowe said.