Thursday, October 5, 2006
Interview with Cydni Tetro, NextPage
In our ongoing interviews, we are talking with technology companies across the Rocky Mountain region. Our interview today is with Cydni Tetro at NextPage (www.nextpage.com), a Draper, Utah, provider of document management software. Cydni is VP of Product and Corporate Marketing at the firm.
Techrockies: Can you tell us a bit about your company and your products?
Cydni Tetro: We started NextPage in 1999, and it's been around for about seven years. When we originally started, we had purchased a product from Folio and built the next generation and entire product suite. That product became profitable for us, but about three years ago we started working on some new high growth opportunities. Two years ago we decided to sell the original technology, to Fast in Norway. The company is now built around a new product initiative called NextPage Documentation Retention and Collaboration. We are now focused on tracking, managing and bringing control to documents on the desktop. What we've found as we started working with companies is that 80 percent of document storage is on hard drives. That's very hard to tame, and makes it hard to collaborate. In the retention space, it's hard to know that those documents exist on the desktop, on a hard drive, or on email, which makes it very difficult to manage risk in an organization.
Techrockies: Who are your typical customers?
Cydni Tetro: Our products, at a high level, fit professional and financial services companies. Our top targets include people like management consulting firms and investment banks, with our secondary market focus on energy companies.
Techrockies: That's interesting--why the energy space?
Cydni Tetro: They have similar characteristics--they are highly regulated, need to manage, retain, and destroy the appropriate documents.
Techrockies: How does your software work?
Cydni Tetro: The way that it works is that there is a lightweight client that gets installed on the desktop. There's also a host component, a global service. When NextPage Retention is on a desktop, it starts tracking documents--versions, copies, etc. For example, if you create a new document and save it, if you email it, make new versions, rename versions, store it on key drive, or even move it to the server, NextPage allows our customer to know exactly all versions of a document that exist. Over time, we've found that the hardest thing is to get users to change, so with our product users don't have to change how they work. All of this is happening in the background. At any time you can see a full report of where all documents are stored, what versions are there, and according to policy of an organization, you can clean up working copies, store archival copies, and reduce liability.
Techrockies: Let's talk a little bit about your funding. I understand your company is venture backed?
Cydni Tetro: Back in 2001, we closed our Series B round. We raised a total of $58M and have not taken any capital since then. Our investors are Oak Investment Partners out of Connecticut, Dominion Ventures out of California, and other smaller firms. We raised that $58M, and also sold our other product division for $15M in cash, which gave us an additional influx. So, we're very well capitalized. Before that, we were running profitably.
Techrockies: So what's next for the company?
Cydni Tetro: Right now we are really focusing on rollout and deployment of our document retention application. We have some very big companies signed up and hope within the next 4-6 months we can formally announce those. We have about 100,000 seats that will be deployed in the next 6-9 months. We are focused on those companies and the tens of thousands of users each deploy. We're also working on our future roadmap. Once you have this kind of infrastructure in place, you can apply desktop policies to make it all easier. For example, you might have a policy that says that HR documents need to be kept for only a year and now you have the infrastructure to roll those policies out to the right people. It becomes a catalyst to help organizations further, ultimately allowing professionals to try to accomplish what a company would like them to do.
Techrockies: How much of the demand for your software is driven by Sarbanes Oxley?
Cydni Tetro: There are definitely SOX issues and eDiscovery issues--especially with Arthur Anderson and Enron--which have created a catalyst of change across organizations. There is also an internal realization at many companies that they need to deploy technology in order to mitigate risks in an organization. In some cases, companies already have a written retention policy, but when it comes to actual enforcement, that’s where our tool really helps. We can provide insight into what's happening.
Techrockies: Thanks for the interview!