When Nick Francis wanted to keep track of the PC's, printers and peripherals hanging about his medical software development company, he couldn't find a software tool able to account for them all.

"There were no tools out there that gave you a central repository," says Francis, president of  Ottawa-based PCI Imageware Corp. "You could buy something like Microsoft SMS which could go out on a LAN and gather up all of your IT assets on the LAN, but it doesn't tell you what isn't connected to the LAN."

To fill the gap, Francis and a team of eight developers created Asset Minder Pro, a software tool that acts as a central repository for all asset information.

"With the Year-2000 problem looming, organizations have been forced into the position of having to catalogue their assets in some way, shape or form to develop a Y2K strategy," he says.

Governments are no exception, says Francis.

"They have moved to the private sector model where all of the assets, at least in IT, are leased and charged back to a local ministry office.   There is no way of auditting this decently, so every month someone gets a big bill and asks, 'Gee, do we have all these PC's?'"

For the cataloguing to run smoothly, users barcode IT assets using a hand held device. Those barcodes are then scanned during an asset audit, the data is ported into a compter and Asset Minder Pro calculates the asset reconciliation.

In development for two years, Asset Minder Pro has just gone on the market and Francis si on the trade show circuit.  He plans to launch an enterprise series that will allow users to run the program over the Internet, which in turn will allow organizations to track assets in branch offices and remote locations.