Australia gets sneak peak of Cumulus Version 8

Canto CEO, Ulrich Knocke, gives locals a taste of new Cumulus Version 8.

On his trip to Australia, Knocke will meet with users in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland in a series of workshops and presentations to preview Cumulus Version 8, which is released in May this year.

The software, which allows companies to organise, find, share and track their illustrations, presentations, video, audio and layouts has been particularly popular in Australia, where it is distributed by DataBasics.

Compared to previous versions, Cumulus 8 was more “intensive” and took over two years to produce.

Pictured: Ulrich Knocke (left) in sunny Sydney, with DataBasics' Ricky Patten.

“We worked extensively with the University of Potsdam and changed a lot of underlying technology,” Knocke said.

“Version 8 will expand upon our ability to address important issues like adding annotation to files along with a new image editor to crop and change the brightness of pictures.”

Australia has been a fertile market for Cumulus, where it is used by 250 organisations. In 2008 DataBasic’s Canto Cumulus sales for Australia and the Southeast Asia region exceeded one million dollars.

According to Ricky Patten, director of DataBasics, these figures are a positive sign that sales will not slow down in the face of a tightening global economy. “As an independent vendor, there are not many people who get near that amount in sales,” Patten said.

Knocke agreed with these sentiments, adding that interest in Cumulus remained strong across the globe. “Even in this climate, the market is growing,” he said.

Patten discovered that Victoria and South Australia have been the two most popular states in Australia.

“Almost every university in Victoria is using Cumulus,” he said, citing that outside of the traditional print sphere, government organisations have been a key market for the software locally.

Knocke believes that in the next year, more than 50 per cent of current Cumulus users will upgrade to Version 8.  “People are very excited about the release and migrating from one version to another is done automatically,” he said.