| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software Gazetteer Solutions Geographic Information Systems (GIS) |
| Founded | Guildford, Surrey, (1996) |
| Headquarters | Woking, Surrey, U.K. |
| Key people | Carl Nunn, Chairman Phil Gee, Commercial Director Dinesh Thanigasalam, Managing Director Andy Hird, Professional Services & Software Development Manager |
| Products | Symphony Suite, iManage, iExchange, iMatch, SinglePoint, Xtended Data Module (XDM), |
| Website | www.aligned-assets.co.uk |
Aligned Assets are a UK-based full service company from Surrey that develops address management and gazetteer software for local authorities, the emergency services and the commercial sector. They almost exclusively work with the AddressBase products from the Ordnance Survey.
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Aligned Assets were formed in 1996 by Carl Nunn, later joined by Phil Gee in 1997 and Mike Saunt (now of Astun Technology) in 1998, who all met whilst working together for MapInfo (now Pitney Bowes MapInfo). Originally working as MapInfo resellers and Geographical Information System (GIS) developers, the company saw early success by securing contracts with companies such as the BBC, Experian and Orange (brand).
Aligned Assets moved into address management with the development in 1997 of the BS7666 Toolbox that was built on behalf of MapInfo to assist UK Local Authorities in the development of the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG). It was the BS7666 Toolbox that went on to form the basis of their current Gazetteer Management System, Symphony iManage.
They are currently the only UK software provider to specialise solely in the gazetteer market working both in the local government sector and with the emergency services. They are the chosen supplier to the British Transport Police [1], Transport for London [2], Birmingham City Council [3] and were involved in the FiReControl [4] project.
After the introduction of BS7666:2006, they were the first company to achieve accredition to the new standard [5] and the first company to have one of their customers fully migrated.[6]
Recent developments have seen them complement their gazetteer management systems with software designed for property management.
iManage - The core of Symphony Suite allowing the creation and maintenance of street, land & property gazetteers. It allows for gazetteer data to be displayed geographically in a map window and was the first product in the UK to be BS7666:2006 accredited.
iExchange - A delivery tool used in local government for disseminating Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) data to departmental systems such as council Tax, electoral roll, planning, etc. as well as automating updates to the NLPG.
iValidate – A module that allows the user to qualify street, land & property data and check for BS7666 compliancy.
iMatch – An addressing matching tool that synchronises legacy systems against BS7666 gazetteers. Works by writing a Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) against successful matches and geocoding the data.
iPlot – A mapping tool that allows the user to design their digitised maps for print in a variety of formats.
Street Naming and Numbering – A module that is designed to speed up the process within local authorities when dealing with the street naming and numbering process.
SinglePoint – Originally built for the British Transport Police, SinglePoint is a multi-gazetteer search engine that is able to return sub-second search results via web services from the AddressBase products as well as searching other non-BS7666 gazetteers simultaneously via the use of adaptors.
Xtended Data Module (XDM) – A supplementary module within the gazetteer management system, the Xtended Data Module allows for additional (non-BS7666) information to be stored in the gazetteer via additional user-defined fields.
Symphony Property Management System (PMS) – Enables an organisation to manage the maintenance, acquisition, sales and legalities involved in the management of large property estates ranging from schools, leisure centres, social housing, parks and investment property such as shops and industrial estates.
Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer - Allows the emergency services to take copies of and updates to AddressBase Premium, which can be built on with local records, improved with candidate records and extended with the Xtended Data Module. It was designed and built in collaboration with the emergency services and is the UK's only gazetteer management system specifically for this sector [7].
Symphony SinglePoint - Based on the solution designed and built for the BTP, Symphony SinglePoint is a flexible, web-enabled search engine that allows the user to search their address database and return results in sub-second time. Its basic concept stems from the idea that the quicker data can be accessed, the quicker it can be used and the better the emergency response. More recently it has been enabled to search names data [8].
The start of 2010 saw the company move into the commercial sector after they became the UK's first reseller of NLPG data [9]. More recently they announced themselves as the first UK company to be able to provide products compatible with the NLPG's replacement - AddressBase [10].
In addition to software for local government and the emergency services, they now offer address management solutions to Housing Associations, Insurance Companies, Utility Firms and into Customer Relationship Management amongst others. These solutions consist mainly of SinglePoint web services and Symphony PMS, both of which are provided prepopulated with AddressBase data.
On 6 July 2010, Aligned Assets announced that they had moved to a new business model, offering Software By Subscription [11]. A quote on their website from their Managing Director Dinesh Thanigasalam states, “By moving to Software By Subscription, we have completely scrapped up front software fees and as a consequence have been able to lower our year-one pricing by an average of 60%.” [12]
Aligned Assets are regarded as a staff-orientated company with continual staff development a priority. They are an ISO 9001 certified company [13] and are also Investors in People accredited[14]. They pursue a carbon offsetting policy by which they contribute to a fund proportional to the amount of miles driven as a result of company business.