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The majority of the funding came from venture capital company Oyster Investment, which was set up by SmartForce founder Bill McCabe. The remainder came from Enterprise Ireland and was in the form of R&D funding for the company's mobile application server suite.
According to WS2, the money will be used to increase its presence in Ireland and to further its sales efforts in the UK with an eventual view to extending its business into Europe and the US.
WS2's chief executive, Richard Fitzgerald, told ElectricNews.Net that finding the money had not been as difficult as he imagined it would be and the company had to turn down investment offers from several suitors. "Given the current climate, we were extremely pleased to raise the money and although it was easier than we thought it was going to be, we faced a much higher level of scrutiny than we would have 18 months ago," commented Fitzgerald.
WS2's patent-pending AstaOra technology is a server-based application that extracts, transforms and integrates business and time critical data with vehicle fleets, mobile devices and Internet clients. The AstaOra server relays information between existing data sources such as legacy systems based on Lotus Notes and MS SQL Server, and Internet-based or mobile clients.
The company currently sees great potential for the technology in the area of monitoring commercial vehicle use. "Information on a vehicle's speed and location can be sent to our server and because we use XML we can take that information from any GPS (global positioning system) unit and integrate it with fleet management systems or service and maintenance systems," explains Fitzgerald.
WS2 is currently working with a UK company on such a project and believes it can benefit from inking further deals in that market. "There is a huge gap in the market because there are seven million commercial vehicles in the UK. At the moment, executives are connected to their offices in a variety of ways, but a company's vehicles are its last disconnected asset," said Fitzgerald.
He added that businesses would benefit from installing such systems through reduced fuel costs, increased productivity and better health and safety.
Founded by Fitzgerald and Peter Mitchell in 1997, WS2 started life as a Web development company working with Gateway, HP, Compaq and Eircom. Since then the company has moved into the applications development area and recent projects include the development of a mobile intranet for UK-based The Leasing Group and a B2B agriculture portal, Farm2trade.ie.
WS2 employs 12 people and plans to increase that number to 20 by year-end. It can be found at http://www.ws2.com.
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