In the Ottawa Valley town of Chalk River, there’s a unique online inventory tracking and asset management company that’s making big waves in the business world.
CyberStockroom gives clients a visual approach to inventory management, allowing customers to create a virtual map of their business and populate it with their products.
Creating a map-based approach to inventory management made sense for CyberStockroom president Emad Hanna, who said he has always been “a very visual learner who liked to sketch things out when I was solving a problem.”
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The flexibility of the software means the Renfrew County firm has a wide range of customers, including EMS, fire departments, police forces, warehouses, IT departments, labs and event production. It has even brought in big-name customers including Roche, Hasbro Gaming and Nordex.
“For our clients, it’s really a question of whether they have physical items that need to be tracked across multiple locations. Those items can be anything, whether you’re selling them, storing them or using them in your industry,” Hanna said.
Visualization and mapping changed everything
Hanna said he came up with the concept for CyberStockroom while working as a lead engineer for Crowdwave Games, where he frequently ran into issues with managing inventory.
“It just seemed to be a hassle to be able to track cameras and cable systems properly. I always had this idea in the back of my head that there should be a better kind of software-as-a-service solution to this problem of inventory management.”
Hanna left the company in 2012 to begin designing and building the software that would eventually become CyberStockroom. Hanna said in those early days, “everything was bootstrapped, and we were still understanding the market” but once he perfected the visualization and mapping aspect of the software, everything changed.
“All of a sudden there was a much higher adoption, and we began to see a partnership lens. We’re now talking about a completely different growth rate.”
The COVID-19 pandemic presented even more growth opportunities for CyberStockroom, which currently has five employees. Hanna said several ambulance, fire and police departments reached out in need of a better solution to tracking emergency medical supplies that were being used more frequently.
Elsewhere, as many companies equipped employees to work remotely, the need to locate and manage IT assets also grew exponentially.
“It became very clear for all these companies that unless they could properly track where these things were and who had them, they were going to lose a lot of money,” Hanna said.
Lansweeper integration
In early 2021, CyberStockroom entered into a partnership with Belgium-based IT asset management company Lansweeper through an integration that allows businesses to keep tabs on their IT assets and monitor where they are located.
Bob Huggins, CyberStockroom’s chief strategic officer, said the integration between the two companies has fit “beautifully,” describing the process as a “one-button integration.”
As Huggins puts it, Lansweeper is the “what” and CyberStockroom is the “where.”
“If a laptop went missing I would be able to locate where it is, and on that laptop I would have various pieces of software, some with licenses that would be needed to be renewed or closed. You magnify that by tens of thousands of clients and it’s certainly a great breakthrough for us,” he said.
Huggins said CyberStockroom is looking to quickly expand as it works towards its goal of making $1 million in annual accruing revenue over the next 12 months.
“We’re seeing leaps of growth from month to month. So I don’t think we’ll have a problem achieving that sort of number, and hopefully we’ll blow it out of the water,” he said.
