In the Media

From the garage to the cloud

April 15, 2021

CT4 Pty Ltd is an Australian based global data analytics solutions company started by a group of like-minded colleagues who were asked by a client to provide a solution to hosting emails and sharing files.

“It was a fairly modest beginning,” said Chief Technical Officer Dan Pearson.

“We bought a server and started to work out of my garage”

“Our client told their friends who in turn told their friends and before long we were hosting from data centres across Australia and into Asia and Europe,’’ he said.

As the world spread, diversification became critical to Canopy Tools success.

“Today’s company is very different to when we first started. We have moved from traditional data centre hosting and IT systems into apps and growing into a data analytics company that provides software to many sectors,’’ Mr Pearson said.

These sectors include bio secure cruises, defence, education, facilities management, government, housing, tourism, health care and mid-tier organisations.

As CEO Craig Adams puts it: “We provide flexible solutions for customer outcomes.”

“Our user-first approach enables us to solve big problems in a fast, efficient manner while helping customers address their pressing issues and achieve rapid transformational results for their organisations,’’ he said.

“We are very much focused in the data space. Essentially, we monetise data; an exciting prospect with the world tipped to have more than 75 billion IoT devices by 2025.

” One of CT4’s major products is called Stratus – a private cloud platform to securely host company workloads, applications and store IoT data.

It will soon launch another core product to be known as Cirrus, which will augment Microsoft 365 email, data and files through a ‘swipe and go’ backup and recovery solution that can be enabled in a matter of minutes to any location on the globe running O365.


“Augmenting the power of Office 365, through providing certainty on the safety of client data, is something our key partners have asked for and we have responded” Mr Pearson said. This solution will be available in Q2 of this calendar year in both the Australian and UK regions.

CT4 is no stranger to new products and significant global growth.

“We are a high growth company built on the foundation of 10 years in business and have recently completed a successful capital raise. We closed a $21 million pre-IPO fundraising round in advance of a potential float in calendar year 2022.’’

“We aim to be ahead of the investment curve. We are actively pursuing acquisition opportunities and we will continue to fund the expansion of our people, product and market growth in Europe, North America and our home base of Australia,’’ Mr Adams said.

“Australia is an incubator of great technology, we are proud to have started here.”

CT4 sees big opportunities in the large European and North American markets while growing its home team here in Australia. It says despite the challenges of COVID-19, the silver lining has been growth in new and existing segments.

A large focus in 2020 was leveraging our existing remote workspace products to keep businesses connected during the pandemic.

“The biggest trend we noticed was that people were accessing applications from the home and using home computers, rather than work-provided devices. The onus was on companies to provide solutions that are open and collaborative,’’ Mr Adams said.

“In the past, before COVID-19, a lot of companies were reluctant to spend money on remote working solutions. But as we’ve seen, there’s been an enormous increase in these services across the world, especially during the pandemic. People are working more flexibly and that’s something that’s here to stay.

“Productivity is a massive benefit. All of a sudden people didn’t have to commute for hours a day and were able to spend that time with their family, or exercising, or catching up on work at a time that suited them.

I think what we’ll see moving forward is a hybrid scenario. Organisational psychology tells us that people start disconnecting with their colleagues if they don’t see them face-to-face, so there are advantages and disadvantages of remote work. But I think as a result of the pandemic there’s a permanent flexibility moving forward.

From breaking the mould to fighting mould, it’s all in a day’s work for CT4.

“Our software offering has been also been commissioned for use in public housing in the UK to reduce costs by up to 60%,’’ Mr Adams said.

“Our software ingests and analyses data that can be used to update maintenance programs and initiate actions to reduce climate impact on properties.

“Up to now the government was spending two thousand pounds per property per year to combat the health risks of mould.

“We install sensors in each property. Once the data is captured and certain thresholds are reached, Canopy sends alerts to maintenance contractors to fix the problem before it becomes a more expensive and dangerous issue down the track.

“We can also send alerts to tenants or we can automate certain control actions via our software. We have software that can provide automatic maintenance where smart products can be used,’’ he said.

Canopy is also working in the bio secure space for cruise ships, monitoring passenger movements on vessels.

“This software will ensure the cruise industry returns this coming northern hemisphere summer season,’’ Mr Adams said.

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