This week in Meet the Team we talk to a true Trojan: Garnet Hampson – Technical Director and co-founder of AssetTagz.

Let’s get straight to the point. If we could write a mantra for Garnet it would be: ‘Get it done, do it right’. Put to him, Garnet responds: “Well, we definitely foster a climate of ‘getting it done, but doing it right’ here in the technical team. There is an energy. We bounce off each other and that propels us forward.”

But what led Garnet to this point as Technical director and Lead developer of AssetTagz?

Although Garnet actually studied Chemistry at Queens College, Oxford, it was a project in his final year of A levels that sparked his interest in coding, as he explains: “Unusually for a senior school in the early 80s, my school had computers and my form teacher also happened to be the IT teacher. He launched a student project to develop a new system to help the school with Accounts and Billing and I was the only one who really showed an interest. I developed a working system for them, and I guess this is where I got the developer bug.”

When asked what his proudest AssetTagz moment is, Garnet says: “It was around 5 years into the business and we’d won a large contract. The client needed something that our Windows Mobile app just wasn’t capable of. We could have bolted the new code on, but we decided to invest the time in a full re-write which, while it caused a lot of late nights at the time, meant that we had a really robust platform to take forward.

I am always banging on about the way that our mobile app is architected, which means AssetTagz is massively configurable. It is therefore very easy to plug in new functions or modify existing behaviour, and that is the result of that decision taken all those years ago.”

Outside of work, Garnet enjoys mountain biking and live music. “I got interested in music in the early 80s when there were lots of interesting things happening.” From post-punk to gothic rock, new wave to American hardcore, Garnet defines his music taste as “bands that generally no-one else has heard of!”

Garnet’s passion for AssetTagz really becomes evident when we start to talk about the next ‘big thing’:“AssetTagz has a very bright future,” he says. “In the last couple of years partnerships have really gained momentum. We have a very successful integration with COiNS, the construction ERP software, and this year we have made great headway with Syrinx, the Point of Rental software. Things are really starting to come together.

But for me, the next really exciting challenge is how our clients can extract even more value from the data that AssetTagz gathers.

I envisage AssetTagz becoming a key source for organisations’ data lakes.

By merging data from multiple sources such as: HR, time & attendance, purchasing and financial systems, and using tools such as Power BI, companies can start to achieve a deeper understanding of how their business performs.

Advanced analytics takes historical data and uses it to forecast what might happen in the future, and this is where AI also starts to play a role and the dataset becomes incredibly powerful.”

With Garnet’s methodical and industry focused approach, it is easy to see how AssetTagz is well placed to continue evolving, creating further value for customers into the future.

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