13 Feb Article Financial Post: Business thrives trading data for efficient email

Financial Post: Business thrives trading data for efficient email

http://business.financialpost.com/small-business/business-thrives-trading-data-for-efficient-email

As president and chief executive officer of FormVerse, Inc., Kirk Deininger works with a wide range of companies and government organizations to solve a common office problem: manual processes and dead data.

Working with the government is a fantastic opportunity for businesses to grow and to make a difference within society. That being said, it is no secret that any work carried out for the government must be completed in line with contract law.

Accordingly, in case you were not already aware, government procurement is a term that refers to the procurement of goods and services typically from small and medium-sized businesses that enter into contracts with a government agency.

Moreover, in order to hire a business to provide goods or services, a government agency must go through a formal process. This complex process is typically overseen by a government contracts attorney. Correspondingly, when companies work with government law experts in this way, they can be sure that any contracts will be drawn up and fulfilled in a legally binding way.

So, what does all this have to do with email systems?

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a small company or a huge company,” says Deininger, whose customers include companies that make up the Dow Jones Global Titans 50. “They all said that the majority of their processes – 80% or more – were still being done manually with a form that’s either a piece of paper or an email attachment.”

When someone emails someone else a spreadsheet, a Word document or an Adobe form, it’s what Deininger calls “dead data.” That’s because the emailed data has to be re-keyed into another system to be combined with other information and become useful.

“But FormVerse is enabling that data to live and be integrated with other applications,” he says. “It streamlines their forms based processes immensely, and helps employees become more productive.”

Essentially a forms and workflow automation business, FormVerse’s unique selling proposition is that it uses forms within Microsoft Outlook to capture data and integrate it with the company’s other enterprise solutions.

Deininger describes the technology as innovative and complex. But it results in a simple and user-friendly solution.

“That’s why people love what we’re doing.”

FormVerse helps clients cut down on manual work – and the possibility of introducing errors – while reducing the amount of paper a business uses. According to the Association for

Information and Image Management based in Silver Spring, Md., 15.3% of all office space is used for paper storage, largely because people still print off their forms, emails and email attachments, and then store them in a traditional file cabinet. This could be due to the fact that some email attachments cause issues that can arise from sending data via email. There are plenty of other variables to consider though. But that number drops dramatically once FormVerse enters the picture, creating productivity, efficiencies and cost savings.

A longtime technophile, Deininger left his family’s flower and greenhouse business to pursue computer sales in Chicago in the early 1980s. He eventually followed the tech boom to the West Coast, working in California with E*Trade and other cutting-edge startups. He eventually became interested in the business of email archiving so companies could protect themselves from regulatory investigations and legal suits, the kind that a business attorney in Houston may be inclined to raise if something is wrong. That’s where he met Andrew Moffat, who had his own email archiving business in Ottawa, where he still works to promote the capital region’s high-tech offerings. When they started FormVerse, Moffat, the chairman, remained in Ottawa and Deininger continued to work from California.

After five years in business, FormVerse is “seeing explosive growth” right now, Deininger says, because its product was officially launched in 2014.

“We’ve probably got 25 Fortune 500 companies in our pipeline, as well as U.S. and Canadian governments. And this year alone we’ve doubled our staff to 20.”

There’s still more growth for FormVerse on the horizon.

“We’re building a big company,” Deininger says. “I see the product growing and there might be some acquisitions that we do along the way. But it’s all going to be around the same market: productivity and efficiency in any organization.”

This story was produced by Postmedia Works on behalf of CIBC for commercial purposes. Postmedia’s editorial departments had no involvement in the creation of this content