New leadership for Aspectus

NEW YORK--Fresh off a $2 million round of funding, analytics software manufacturer Aspectus has hired a chief executive officer who knows a little something about raising money. Newly installed Dieter Kondek raised $3.25 million in January of 2005 to get DynaPel, the video surveillance company where he served as president and chief executive officer for four years, listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. Now he is charged with ramping up North American sales for a company that has previously been largely focused on Europe and the Middle East. "It's a little similar to DynaPel," Kondek said of Aspectus, "but at the enterprise level." He'll be focused on working with integrators and OEMs to get Aspectus's Agent VI analytics software specified for applications mainly in the transportation and financial sectors. In that endeavor he'll have help from two new Aspectus board members. Russell MacDonnell, chairman and chief executive officer of Rapid Response Monitoring and owner of integrator Intelli-Tec Security Services, brings knowledge of a wide swath of the security market's ground level. Peter Gyenes, chairman and chief executive officer of software maker Ascential until it was acquired by IBM last year, has four decades of experience in high technology. Their backgrounds reflect Kondek's stated focus for Aspectus heading forward: developing a larger R&D team and working with integrators to get product to market. He said he's hiring a sales and tech support force to fan out across the United States, "helping our partner network, training them and helping them to install pilot projects." Further, Aspectus has just hired "several new algorithm guys" for its Israeli R&D facility and is creating a new application program interface team here in New York that will help hardware manufacturers work with Aspectus's software, which it touts as the analytics product requiring the lowest bandwidth, as it only transmits meta-data, rather than actual video, back to a central server. "In several places now, our sales team is creating the demand," said Kondek, "and then we talk to integrators who are in the segment and we try to create partnerships with them." As with many manufacturers with IP applications designed for the enterprise level, "We don't want to have an overly large partner network," he said. "We're looking for the top players in the verticals. We will concentrate on them and get them some exclusivity. The goal is to have between 25 and 35 resellers all over the nation and establish a real partner-equal system, with combined training and implementation." Also, Aspectus will be establishing a technical advisory board, staffed by its integrator partners and end users, "to tell our R&D team what they'd like to see in the next feature set." Kondek hopes to have five members by year end.