Clearview's ECM Revival

In late 2005, Mike Ball, an ECM (enterprise content management) industry veteran whose resumé includes executive positions at EMC and Macrosoft, joined Xenysys, a manufacturer
of ECM software, as senior VP of marketing and product strategy. Shortly after his arrival, Xenysys went through a dramatic brand transition that included a corporate name change to Clearview, a new logo, and a series of product enhancements. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ball about his decision to initially join the Xenysys team, the impetus behind the corporate rebranding, and how Clearview’s strategic direction and product features differentiate the company from the pack of other ECM software players on the market.

Integrated Solutions: What made you decide to pursue the opportunity with Xenysys?
Ball: Key to my decision was that I would be rejoining a group of people that I worked closely with in the past — namely Xenysys’ CTO Ken Creech, and chief architect, William Binder. Together, we were very successful at bringing IDM (integrated document management) to the marketplace in the ’90s through platforms we developed for Macrosoft. Furthermore, I felt the technology platform that Ken and William designed for Xenysys was a step ahead of other ECM platforms being offered by legacy providers. I saw an opportunity for us to take this technology, and our knowledge and experience from the past, and combine it with a lot of the content capabilities Microsoft was about to launch as part of Sharepoint and Office 2007. I was excited by the prospect of being able to innovate more rapidly than existing legacy ECM systems were capable of at the time and partnering with Microsoft to offer end users a new ECM alternative.

Integrated Solutions: What was the impetus behind the name and brand change to Clearview?
Ball: The Xenysys brand didn’t do a lot for us from a marketing perspective. We were always being asked how to spell or pronounce Xenysys, which didn’t bode well for the brand recognition of our organization. Furthermore, the confusion around the Xenysys name didn’t create the image that our company needed to reflect on the modern technology we were launching into the market. We saw our growing partnership with Microsoft as the perfect opportunity for us to relaunch the company with a new product set and a new brand identity that positioned us more elegantly in the marketplace. We chose the name Clearview because it was clean and simple, but more importantly, it echoed the value proposition of our software solution — which is to provide business users with a clear view of all of their enterprise content regardless of what repositories or solutions it resides in.

Integrated Solutions: How exactly does your software work with Microsoft?
Ball: Microsoft’s integration of Sharepoint and Office has provided a strong platform for dynamic content management (i.e. content that evolves and changes over time). Clearview’s value proposition is it has developed a platform that is strong at managing fixed content such as document images and COLD (computer output to laser disc). This content tends to have high volume, transaction, and indexing requirements. So, we leveraged our strengths with Microsoft’s and wrapped it all together to create a virtual repository that is capable of taking all content, unifying it, and intelligently organizing it based on business requirements. Clearview has an iFolders (intelligent foldering) feature that actually searches every content repository in use at an organization (this can be additional third party ECM repositories as well), aggregates it, and organizes it into a comprehensive user view based on how the business operates. This makes it easy for a business to have a universal view of all its content regardless of where it currently resides.

Integrated Solutions: What differentiates Clearview from the numerous other players in the ECM market? Why will Clearview be attractive as an ECM alternative?
Ball: Clearview had the opportunity to do something most legacy ECM players can’t do — reinvent its ECM software from the ground up. We were able to take advantage of new technology — from development platforms to architectural elements such as a Web services — and used that technology to introduce a fresh approach to how ECM is implemented, leveraged, and utilized across the enterprise.
   In addition to Clearview’s iFolders feature, the company is also promoting affordable mass adoption of basic content services with the industry’s first ECM gadget. Invented by Microsoft, gadgets are lightweight, single-purpose applications that sit on a user’s computer desktop or are hosted on a Web page. We’ve branded our gadget Iriss because it’s an acronym for the functionality our gadget delivers (i.e. integrated repositories, integrated search and store). Iriss was inspired by Vista technology, and much like other Vista gadget applications, Iriss sits on the desktop waiting for the user to activate on-demand content or document services. With drag-and-drop functionality, knowledge workers can quickly retrieve document or content information directly from their line-of-business applications, eliminating the need for costly programming and integration services. Similarly, documents or other business content created on the desktop can be dropped into the Iriss gadget and quickly stored in the Clearview ECM repository. We sell the Iriss gadget for a U.S. list price of $199. This gives businesses an opportunity to deploy ECM on a much broader scale than perhaps they could have done with the pricing models of some of the legacy ECM products.
   A final differentiator for Clearview is its leadership team. Each member of our team has extensive experience in the ECM industry. We know what works with a lot of the legacy products, and we know what doesn’t work, and we were able to take that experience and leverage it to build this new solution from the ground up — designed to meet today’s modern ECM requirements.

Integrated Solutions: What are your overall goals in terms of performance for the company? How will you measure your success?
Ball: Obviously, the measure of any company’s success in today’s business environment is revenue growth and profitability, and those are key parts of our business goals as well. However, as a newer company, we’ve been very realistic with our growth projections and we won’t put profitability and investor return ahead of delivering the technology and services that are going to make the company successful for the long term. Microsoft has been, and will continue to be, a very key part of our success. Microsoft executives have taken a keen interest in how we’ve taken our software to market and how we’ve promoted Microsoft as a platform for ECM services.