Business

Companies of all size have spent the last few years heavily investing in information technology to help them run their business. This infusion of technology and decreasing costs has provided them with the infrastructure to collect enormous amounts of information from all kinds of sources and all types of formats. According to a Gartner Group report companies are inundated with information, from as many as 14 different databases. Companies spend 60 to 70 percent of their application development resources creating ways to access disparate data. This has caused a large knowledge gap between the total amount of information available and information that is actually used to successfully run a business. Gartner Group is projecting that this knowledge gap will continue to grow larger into the next century.

Company History

Market Opportunity

According to a recent IDC report, worldwide knowledge/document management software sales are scheduled to grow to $1.5 billion by 2001 and has been recognized as one of the most promising high technology growth market segments by financial and industry analysts. Through the implementation of an Internet presence, strong potential exists for increased competitive differentiation among today's businesses. In order to be able to achieve this advantage, enterprises need to move forward by deploying new Internet-enabled software and services. These dynamics have created a number of drivers fueling the growth of the market. The continuing growth of the business use of the Internet; the demand for knowledge management and business intelligence;  solutions that are designed to be cost effective, easily installed, customized and managed by non-technical computer users; and the need to support mission critical applications over the Internet.

Product Strategy

April &Me is developing knowledge management solutions optimized for use on the Internet that are cost effective, easily installed, customized and managed by non-technical computer users. April & Me's SimplyDocsÔ solution is powered by a unique user interface, customizable components, custom Internet search engine and zero administration system management technology. The system allows for the creation and control of the documents necessary for the company and its clients, for example a law firm. A law firm needs to store information by case number, type of case, lawyer(s) involved, plaintiff(s), defendants and so on. SimplyDocsÔ enables non-technical computers users to personalize services for multiple and unique classes of business applications. SimplyDocsÔ solution provides greater ease of use, simplicity of management at one-third the cost of other document management solutions.

Target Markets

Over the past 18 months, SimplyDocs has been beta tested in the legal office environment. This marketplace is the first of many market verticals the company is investigating for possible sales opportunity. Presently the legal market has 48,000 potential small to medium firms that are being targeted by the SimplyDocs team. Additional markets to be investigated are the Manufacturing, Financial, Insurance, and the Airline Industry.