Print IT Reseller - issue 52

01732 759725 AI 20 M-Files Corporation continues to see strong metrics. Established in Finland in 2005, it has a large US presence, entered the UK in 2014 and opened new offices in France, Australia and Canada in 2017, with the French office resulting from the acquisition of Streamdesign, a local French partner. Since the company first entered the ECM market, it has, according to Waterton, grown pretty spectacularly. M-Files reports strong performances in both direct sales and through its global partner network. Over the past six years, it has continued to see sustained success, accounting for more than 750 per cent revenue growth during that period, driven by uptake in its SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) business, along with accelerating market acceptance of its unique intelligent information management platform. In addition to enhancing its product and services portfolio, globally, the company has increased headcount by a further 12 per cent, as well as making several significant internal promotions, notably to its UK team. Today, the business has more than 600 partners worldwide and 400+ employees. It grew revenue in the UK by more The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in document management is continuing to make great strides in improving office productivity. Tim Waterton, Senior Director of UK Business at M-Files, explains how M-Files is capitalising on this Intelligent information management than 78 per cent year-on-year in 2017, an achievement it says complements the wider company’s growth and reinforces its position as one of the most innovative, fastest-growing providers in the information management space. “We have outstripped the growth that you would typically see from companies in this sector,” said Waterton, “Success has come really from us committing to a blend of technology innovation and agile delivery. The way that we approach this market is very much driven by technology innovation which allows us to deliver our solutions in an agile way, which means that our customers end up getting what they want rather than something that they’ve envisaged or designed six, nine, or even 12 months beforehand.” Key differentiator Waterton contends that the key differentiator is its completely metadata- centric model for managing content. “We focus on managing information based on what it is, as opposed to where it’s stored,” he said. “Take a contract that’s stored on a network drive, in M-Files we would describe what that document is – it would have metadata about the supplier, key contact, internal employee responsible for managing that contract, effective date, expiry date etc. attached. That means we are able to link the contract back to all the customer’s systems of record and present that information in context with those systems, instead of it simply being a document on a network drive. Importantly, with M-Files, each document has context with the way the customer has already chosen to run their business.” Today, businesses are dealing with an increased amount of information and struggling to keep track of where everything resides. “If you think of a typical business, information can be distributed across multiple content systems – one statistic quoted is that 43 per cent of organisations use four or more content systems – from SharePoint, to Dropbox to Google Drive, and it’s been reported that 25 per cent of badly filed documents are never found,”Waterton said. He added: “M-Files wants to put an end to the idea that all data must reside in one, central place. Instead our vision is to deliver a simple and unified experience for intelligently finding, accessing and managing information residing within any system, without disturbing existing processes and, the users that depend on them. These traditional approaches to information and document management aren’t working and therefore a rethink is needed. This is the challenge that we are actively addressing.” Today, businesses are dealing with an increased amount of information and struggling to keep track of where everything resides continued... TimWaterton