Christmas message from the Boardroom 2018

Written by Dinesh Thanigasalam, Commercial Director

All the team at Aligned Assets would like to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! If you’ve not seen our Merry Christmas card yet, you can access it here.

We’d like to thank all our customers and partners for their continued support and are delighted to welcome some new organisations into the fold. 2018 has been a great year in terms of growth and product development, and we very much look forward to working with you all next year.

We continue to place a huge emphasis on developing robust relationships with all those we work with, and enjoy the open dialogue that brings. It’s this two-way communication that helps us to understand how our products and services can be fine-tuned to better meet our customers’ needs. As ever, we’re committed to providing you with the very best solutions by working with any of your current suppliers, as well as continuing to work with a wide portfolio of partners, including Ordnance Survey, GeoPlace and Cadcorp, to name a few.

Welcome to the fold!

We’re delighted to welcome the following newcomers to the Aligned Assets community, and look forward to a successful year ahead:

Community

We feel very fortunate to enjoy the great strength of community between us, our customers and partners, as we all work hard together to achieve the best results. This sense of community was clearly demonstrated by the participation in our Symphony User Group events this year, where we had a record number of customers and partners coming together to share ideas and successes, learn about and contribute towards developments, and network with industry colleagues. We also enjoyed supporting the wider GIS community through our demos and attendance at events like GeoData, GeoPlace Conference, UK Mapping Festival and BAPCO Newcastle, in addition for making our Symphony AR app available for Gazetteers @ GIS Day, UK Mapping Festival and GeoDATA Conference and Exhibition.

Driving efficiencies

As organisations across the country continue to drive efficiency savings, we’ve seen a 100% increase in the number subscribing to a Hosted Environment. This something we expect to see more of in the coming year as it alleviates set-up and maintenance costs while ensuring access to the most up-to-date, accurate address and UPRN data.

International development

2018 saw us continuing our work in Africa. Working with partner organisation, Jospong Group in Ghana, we set out to allocate a street name for every street in the country, using our specially adapted SNN International solution. Using principles from the British Standard for addressing, the World Bank standards for street naming and numbering and conventions from the Universal Postal Union, we were able to name and number all the streets and properties in Greater Accra.

Looking ahead to 2019

In addition to the continual developments in products and services, we have a few exciting projects ahead. To name a few:

We’re redeveloping the website to enhance navigation and user experience. To complement that, we’re launching a Customer Portal where you can access knowledge based information, log and track support queries, and contribute to our forum all from the one place. This will not only enable quicker and easier access to information and support, it will also go towards to strengthening our community further.

Our augmented reality mobile application is being trialled by the National Fire Chiefs Council in early 2019. This is a great opportunity for fire services to test out the value of interpreting location based data and risk information in this visual format, and the tangible benefits it can bring.

We will continue our work in Ghana, helping the government to maximise remittance of taxes and payment for services, as well as the provision of services, utilities and emergency services.

In addition to the regular events we attend and organise, we’re looking forward to seeing many emergency services colleagues, both old and new, at the Emergency Services Show in September 2019. This is a first for us, so please do come along and see us if you’re there.

Due to the redevelopment of our office space, we’ll be looking for a new place to call home next year. Don’t worry though, as soon as we have an address we’ll let you know…and as always…if you’re passing, do drop in for a cuppa!

In all areas of our offering, we shall continue to push the boundaries of excellence, and look forward to your company on this journey.

And finally…

We’d like to wish you all a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! If you need to get hold of us over the Christmas period, check out our Christmas Support Hours here.

All the very best wishes and we’ll see you on the other side!