Please tell us a little about yourself and Ask UMA
I’ve been in the tech industry for many years and most recently with Ask UMA. Ask UMA is a revolutionary piece of software that is designed to optimise an organisation’s space, efficiency and sustainability, by helping them manage their building and AV/IT equipment, along with other devices, such as aircon and anything that uses power. Ask UMA uses AI within the platform and process, but always leaves the company and individual user with the final decision, so there are no concerns about it “taking over” your business…
Why would Ask UMA be of interest to Installation’s readership…
From an end user point of view, installing or overlaying Ask UMA onto a new or existing system allows them to manage their own workspace, providing a massive saving on energy and other utility costs, even cleaning… The software often pays for itself many times over in savings on footprint, utilities and employee retention. From the channel’s point of view, it provides additional new revenues and also provides a reason for distributors, consultants, integrators and VARs to recontact previous clients. UMA is normally backwardly compatible, as it integrates with Teams, Google, Webex and Zoom, and most major hardware brands, such as Jabra, Neat, AMX, Yealink, Poly, Crestron, Avocor and so on. I genuinely don’t know of another platform that allows the channel to do that and still provides significant savings to the end user.
How is business at the moment?
2023 was a record year for the business, and we are targeting 2024 to deliver even great results. However, we believe we need to do more to inform end users and the channel about our features and benefits, especially around sustainability, to help drive further growth. Hence why we are doing ISE this year and also why editorial interviews like this are so important to us. We no longer want to be the best kept secret.
What do the next 12 months look like for Ask UMA?
After ISE, we plan to look at InfoComm and an “all out” push on the US Market. There is an awful lot of work to do before that, not least finding US representation and opening a satellite office out there. Like many smaller companies, we know that we need to tackle the US market, but we want to do so in a way that provides a high-level of ongoing service to the US channel and end users. Alongside this, we also want to expand further into Europe and so are already looking at re-building the current website and making it multilingual ahead of that. We already have customers in the US and Europe, so it’s more a question of doing more and doing it in a more targeted way.
What are the pinch points for Ask UMA in terms of the next 12 months?
Like most startups it will be cashflow; we are currently privately backed and so we are actively looking for some outside investment, as well as using the increased subscriptions we are seeing to develop more and more features and benefits for Ask UMA, which means more solutions for the market. We’ve just created a new integration that allows End Users to turn unused devices on and off remotely and via AI. We also just released a new feature that allows End Users to tie into their utility costs and dial them down super accurately, even by individual devices. We believe that these sorts of features and benefits will strongly resonate, especially over here in the UK and Europe with the larger corporates, government departments and others in their push to Net Zero.
