XYTHOS ADDS NEW MEDICAL RESEARCH AND FINANCIAL SERVICES CUSTOMERS
Web-based ECM Alternative Appeals to Cost-Conscious Companies
October 17, 2005
Orlando, FL – October 17, 2005 – At the Gartner Symposium, Xythos Software, the leading developer of simple document and file management software, today announced the selection of its Enterprise Document Manager 5.0 application by new medical research and financial services customers. Among these customers are the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System Hospitals and Sudbury Regional Hospitals which have selected Xythos to help improve document security and collaboration and automate administrative document processes. In addition, Stone & Youngberg and Cicada Corporation join Xythos’ growing list of financial services customers. Combined with Xythos’ other new customers, they help push the company past the two million licensed users milestone for 2005.
Requirements for improved document security are nothing new to the medical and financial services industries, yet many organizations still struggle to provide easy to use solutions for their users to safely access, manage and share their files. Xythos’ Enterprise Document Manager 5.0 was created to specifically address the problems associated with email file attachments and provide a secure alternative to traditional enterprise content management (ECM) systems. While the new Xythos Enterprise Document Manager 5.0 adds integrated workflow and automated document classification, Xythos’ new customers continue to cite its ease of integration, support of open standards, and common security methods as key reasons for their selection.
“Xythos has remained focused on providing open standards-based solutions for document management that address increased security requirements while remaining compatible with customer’s existing applications,” remarked Ed Miller, CEO of Xythos. “We’re seeing an increased demand from distributed enterprise organizations to improve their collaborative capabilities without sacrificing document security or having to adopt costly ECM systems. Customers like Stone & Youngberg have significant investments in their existing infrastructure and they don’t necessarily want to abandon that,” he added.
At Stone & Youngberg, a fixed income securities firm and the largest underwriter in California of tax-exempt government bonds, CIO Mark Rogers’s IT staff supports employees in eight locations, from the Pacific Northwest to Maryland and Virginia. As Stone & Youngberg’s underwriting department has expanded nationally, the need to safely share confidential documents, centralize their management and provide a simple solution for ‘deal document’ collaboration was critical. Being able to re-use the content from one deal document when working on the next was vital to the process improvements Stone & Youngberg needed to grow. Centralizing those documents and the business functions that support them would enable the company to develop a best-of-breed approach to structuring its deals.
As a result of an initiative led by its bankers who requested a Windows-friendly and intuitive product to share and store critical proposals, presentations, and negotiating instruments, the IT staff evaluated a variety of traditional enterprise content management applications -- but ultimately determined that their costs were prohibitive. The firm’s existing document management system was application-dependent and did not easily integrate with the various versions of Microsoft Windows and Office that the firm was using. Since the developer of the application had been acquired and an upgrade to a more expensive system would be required, it was an appropriate time for Stone & Youngberg to evaluate more useful alternatives.
In the Xythos Enterprise Document Manager 5.0, Rogers and his users found a solution that was intuitive, easy to use and was both platform and application-independent. “We wanted to leverage the web as much as possible for collaboration and storage, but didn’t want to perform a wholesale upgrade of our desktop applications. Xythos enables our users to collaborate on deal documents, easily access stored version histories, and better utilize the firm’s stored knowledge – all without leaving the applications they already know and use,” observed Rogers.
Having decided to acquire the Enterprise Document Manager 5.0 just as hurricanes Katrina and Rita were pounding the southern states, Rogers’ team also realized that providing web access to documents also fit well with the company’s disaster recovery plan. “Our disaster recovery plan is dynamic – with lots of live documents being used on an iterative basis. With the natural disasters that have occurred recently we recognized that a web-enabled document management system would provide redundant and secure access to the documents our bankers needed and reduce the load on our email servers as well. Our bankers could exchange secure document links using Xythos instead of emailing huge file attachments back and forth over our network,” stated Rogers. “Their need to collaborate actually promoted the use of a centralized document store, helping fulfill part of our disaster recovery requirements, “he concluded.
According to Karen M. Shegda, Research Director, Enterprise Content Management for the Gartner Group, “Demand is increasing for low-cost, low-complexity platforms that safely create, access, share and deploy documents and files across the corporate intranet and the Internet. Much of this demand is driven by the pressure to stop sharing documents in e-mail and to stop using uncontrolled file servers, as well as by compliance and legal discovery requirements.”
About Xythos Software
Xythos Software is a leading developer of easy-to-use solutions for managing and sharing content of any type using open standards-based technology. Xythos’ web-enabled document and content management applications and its WebFile Server development platform helps organizations safely capture, manage, store and share content throughout its lifecycle. Xythos products are licensed to over two million users at commercial, education and government organizations around the world. To learn more about Xythos, visit
www.xythos.com or call 1-888-4XYTHOS.
- For further information:
- Marti Colwell, Creative Marketing Group
- (760)438-3399
- marti@cmgdelivers.com