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The document management software products around at that time were undoubtedly good at what they did, but they were addressing the large corporate market primarily. I saw a big gap in the small and medium business market: some users would go with something like PaperPort, which was a product really designed for the smaller, maybe home-based, user. Then there was a big leap to the larger solutions that frankly most small and medium sized companies simply couldn't afford.

It was clear that there was scope for products to fill that gap, and so we came to develop the core products that we still focus on today, Dokmee DMS and Dokmee Capture.

DT: And is the Office Gemini business now solely positioned around that original SME proposition?
BR: We are still very much focused on the SME marketplace, but we do have some large customers as well. Usually this is where a large global corporation uses Dokmee within a local market such as African countries, Mexico or the Middle East.

For example, PetroChina is China's largest oil company, and Dokmee is used throughout all of their Middle Eastern offices. This reflects a shift we've seen a lot in the past few years: it used to be that big corporations would buy a product like Documentum or FileNet and deploy worldwide - but the problem is that the product wouldn't necessarily solve the needs of the company in every country where they operate. So these days it seems like many of these large corporations treat their country subsidiaries like separate businesses, and allow them to choose the products and tools that are the best fit for their environment. The days of being 'forced' to use a FileNet or Documentum system are long gone, thankfully.

This has meant that deployment times have reduced drastically, as you might imagine. Some of these local subsidiaries could wait five years or more to see an ECM or DM system go live in their office. Now if they come to us, they can have a solution up and running within a few weeks. We have even had the situation in large corporations in the US where they had a large scale ECM system already in place, but they still brought us in for a specific use case, because by the time they could deploy that big system where it was needed, the project would be out-of-date. It was easier, quicker and cheaper to get a solution 'out of the box' from us.

The problem with a solution like Documentum is that, while you can do so many things with it, it is essentially a 'toolbox', and building everything you need that way can take forever and a day. Increasingly companies just don't have the luxury of that time - and they don't want to spend that sort of money any more, of course.

What happened with a lot of historical ECM deployments was that companies effectively bought a Ferrari when they only needed it to go to and from the office every day - a Toyota could have done the same job for them just fine, and would have saved them a ton of money into the bargain.

DT: Now that you are actively selling into the UK, do you have specific target markets in mind, or is the focus more on building channel programmes?
BR: We have always operated across a wide variety of vertical markets - we work a lot with smaller government departments and ministries, City Hall type setups in the USA and France particularly. We are also very active in education in universities, and the health sector with clinics, hospitals and doctors' offices. We also have all sorts of clients in transportation and manufacturing.

As far as our plans for growth in the UK, we're not targeting any specific vertical markets; our focus is currently much more on recruiting the right channel partners. We're keen to find more resellers - we work very well with Systems Integrators and service bureaux, as well as MFP resellers.

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