Carl, how has the economy over the last year tested your management skills?

The past year has been one of the most challenging periods ever in the IT industry. Fortunately, I have been through a number of turnarounds in my career, so I have had experience of operating a business under difficult market conditions. The need to reduce costs and focus on core business activities and key customers under these circumstances is critical to the survival of a company. Many of the companies that started up during the boom years of the late 1990's have failed, as they did not have realistic business plans that took into account the reality of market conditions. It could also be due to the fact that the management of many of these companies has never experienced a downturn in the market, especially to the extent of the current downturn.

Carl, what is your background and involvement in eDM?

I have been involved in the technology industry all my life, starting as a design engineer in the early 80's, then progressing through various sales and marketing roles into a general management function. As mentioned, I have run various companies and been involved in the successful turnaround of a number of companies during my career. One of the biggest challenges I faced was managing a revenue management joint venture company between global giant, Siemens and the much smaller, entrepreneurial company, Spescom Ltd. In spite of the cultural differences, this turned out to be one of the most profitable divisions in the Siemens power operations.

I joined Spescom Software Inc in August, 2001 with great expectations to grow the company on the platform that had been put in place since Spescom Ltd took a controlling interest in the company during 2000. Within two weeks of my arrival, the events of 9/11 occurred and totally disrupted all business plans.

What did you do since that event?

We did two things. Firstly, we reconsidered the strategic positioning of the company to ensure that we were focusing all our efforts in the areas in which we had a strong competitive advantage. Secondly, we reduced the overall cost structure to bring it in line with realistic anticipated revenues for the next few quarters.

I am pleased to say, that on both fronts we have made significant progress. Our financial performance over the past three quarters has improved substantially and we are back at a break-even situation. Also, our strategic positioning is proving to be successful and a number of major contracts having been won, including NetworkRail (RailTrack) and Lloyds Register of Shipping in the UK and Sempra Energy and Bechtel in the USA, amongst others.

Tell us a bit about the company's background?

To do so, I need to go a bit into the history of the company. Spescom Software was previously known as Altris Software and was one of the original vendors in the electronic document management market. The company went through a difficult period during the late 90's and Spescom Ltd acquired a controlling interest in 2000. Spescom had developed a powerful product data/configuration management suite and recognized the potential of integrating the Altris document management technology with its own technology to offer a unique solution into certain markets.

Out of these technologies and investments, an essentially "new" company called Spescom Software emerged in 2001. It had both document and product data/configuration management technology and skills under one roof, as well as the impressive customer base that Altris had established over many years. The company is headquartered in San Diego, California and has an international sales and support center in London, UK.

Tell us about your strategic positioning?

The fact that we have developed a fully integrated software platform comprising document management and product data/configuration management functionality as well as having added records management capabilities, provides us with a very powerful, flexible and highly differentiated offering in the market place.

Whereas most document management vendors have striven to add web content, digital asset management and collaborative capabilities to their suites, we have added a totally different dimension to this space. In fact, we are addressing a problem that has been identified by a number of analysts, including Gartner and Daratech, amongst others. It is that many enterprises involved in the design, construction and/or operation of complex products, plants or assets (e.g. utilities, transportation, pharmaceuticals, process manufacturing, aerospace/defense, telcos, etc) are faced with the issue of whether to use a document management or a product data management system as the primary tool for managing all the information about the product, plant or asset. Each tool has its benefits but neither addresses the full requirements of all users in the enterprise.

This is exactly where we fit in. Our product, called eB, contains both sets of functionality fully integrated and can be deployed at price points that enable the full combined functionality to be made available to all users across and beyond an enterprise.

What problems do your solutions solve?

Apart from solving standard imaging and document management problems, we can address some really strategic issues within an enterprise - that of managing change and ensuring information integrity. The problem that many companies in our target markets face, is that the information they have about their products, assets, infrastructures and processes is inaccurate and obsolete. This occurs because change is continuous in most enterprises and is initiated by many different people who generally do not appreciate or have the tools to determine the impact of change. This results in an inevitable lack of conformance between the requirements for a product or asset (e.g. functional, safety, environmental, etc), the actual configuration of the product or asset and all the information (e.g. documents, drawing, records, etc) that describes the product or asset.

We often challenge companies to estimate the level of their information integrity and get alarming responses such as between 60% and 70%. The fact that many of these industries are highly regulated and need to conform to stringent safety, environmental and other requirements, makes this a major problem for them. Some of them try to ignore the severity of the potential risks they face, but more and more are realizing the strategic benefits of managing change effectively throughout their organizations and improving the integrity of their information.

The benefits of implementing our solutions are significant, both from an ROI perspective, as they enhance the overall effectiveness of the organization by improving decision making, reducing costs, improving customer service levels, etc as well as ensuring conformance with ever-increasing regulatory requirements.

What are your views on the eDM industry, in general?

Customers want solutions that solve their business problems. They don't want to have to integrate multiple document management technologies to achieve this with the associated costs and risks. As a result, we are seeing the bigger players acquiring smaller vendors to enhance their product offering and provide more comprehensive functionality.

Also ease of integration across applications is becoming more important. We find that many companies have made significant investments in a variety of applications, yet are not achieving the benefits they had hoped for, as these applications are not integrated. We see ourselves as playing an important role in this as our product can act as a common denominator tying a variety of applications together.

Why do you think you will be successful?

I believe we will be successful because we offer a proven, differentiated product, an experienced and dedicated team in both the US and UK and a solid blue chip customer base. In spite of our size, we have been winning major contracts with leading enterprises, often against stiff competition from much larger competitors. Our major challenge is to ramp up our sales and marketing efforts and raise our visibility in the market place.