Vision makes Lasata a winner for second year

A WEST Perth-based software company has wowed the critics for the second time to take out Austrade’s Information Industry Exporter of the Year Award for WA.

It may sound like a fluke for an 11-year old private company of two principals, except for the fact that Lasata Software scored the same State award last year in addition to its national counterpart.

And if that endorsement isn’t enough, Lasata customers include companies that inhabit the top rungs of the Global 500, among the likes of General Motors, Royal Dutch/Shell Group, General Electric, Toyota and Citigroup.

Lasata is a specialist in business information solutions and managing director Steve Wall says its products “enable executives to make faster, more informed decisions and allow companies and organisations to extract more value from their information assets”.

The company’s previous flagship was Vision, a packaged software product that allowed company heads to mine information, mostly from accounts.

“There’s a lot of data in a company,” spokesman Guy Grant says.

“But Lasata products analyse data in further detail in what’s called drill-down, where you drill further into the data to find the reasons why things happen that decision-makers need.”

Vision’s successor – Inside Out – will be released in the UK this month, which Mr Grant describes as a ‘data framework’ that can process and disseminate data from any other data source.

“Any data that’s critical to a business can be imported,” he says.

“Inside Out can set up automatic responses to certain data, for example, so it automates the routine tasks of running a business.”

Whereas Vision was primarily finance-based, Inside Out can crunch numbers from any other quarter of a business as well – stock inventories and human resource assets – and pluck the material out of the application of database that created or houses it.