PointCross 10th Anniversary

November 4, 2009 at 12:00 AM | Posted in Future of IT, Oil & Gas, Pharmaceutical | 3 Comments

Today is our 10th birthday – November 4th, 1999 was the day we started in business with little more than an idea and a trivial amount of seed capital. You have been with us since our early days – encouraging us, supporting us, and guiding us. All of us at PointCross join in thanking you for your belief in us.

I would like to share with you a few of our accomplishments of the past 10 years and some of our aspirations for the future.

We have crossed a threshold in our evolution as a company. We are no longer a start-up, and yet we have retained our entrepreneurial spirit and nimble adaptability. We have been self-funded since 2001 and profitable since 2004; we have no operating debt. We grew very well and profitably through the recent recession. We acquired a small company that allowed us successful entry into the health-sciences market. We don’t have VCs to contend with. Very few of the technology companies that started with us in 1999 remain in existence – most folded; the remaining were acquired by other entities and lost the promise of their original technology. Of the few that remain, most have changed their business model and elected to provide services and consulting to shore up revenues. Today, our technology runs in some of the top companies in the world including Shell, Hoffman La Roche, and Pemex among so many others.

PointCross came through the trials and successes of the past 10 years stronger, even more agile, and even more effective in delivering the most advanced technologies for enterprise search, institutional memory, decision support, secure communications and strategic business processes. We built a very strong culture of innovation and service with intellectual honesty that is uniform across our globally deployed virtual team. This culture is strong enough to sustain itself into the future. We are tuned in to the trends in the market and what our customers want and need. We are confident that our products, services and culture are right for the needs of this tough market and the future.

Here are some of the trends we see in the market:

• A strong demand for interactive, navigable search for authorized data and content across the enterprise. Unstructured search engines are great at finding a large number of documents from a huge mound of documents – but E&P professions need to know if there is a well log that suggests a particular lithology; and Pharma scientists want to know if a certain parameter in an animal’s blood shows a specific behavior compared to the changes in liver function in any study.

• A strong push to drive IT costs down by increasing the value from software while reducing the number of applications in the inventory, as well as the time and expense of implementing enterprise-wide solutions which now seem inevitably to stretch out for years and hundreds of millions of dollars. 7 days for one process; 20 weeks for 20 processes – no specs no quarrel – all fixed price; that is what they want.

• An integrated, seamless environment that customers can securely extend without fuss to external partners and vendors. There is no patience for siloed software that will not inter-operate and work as one.

User Forums and “I Wish…”

I Wish… has been very successful for us and for our customers. It has allowed us to hear the voice of the customer well and for us to react fast to those voices. We have failed at times but we use the metrics to learn from our mistakes and continually improve. But we also understand that there is a lot of value in having a forum where current and even prospective customers can interact and share their views of the future and their needs so we can accelerate our roadmap and delivery. To that end, we are requesting that customers and others in the industry join our Orchestra Conductor forum where you will have the power to influence our roadmap and direction. Please send us an email join us.

About a month ago, we launched this blog as a way to share some of our serious, and many of our not-so-serious views about the world of enterprise software, business, trends, and the latest products and breakthroughs that we’re working on. Please take a moment to look around our blog, share a comment, and come back now and then as we continue to share exciting new developments.

The reason we are introducing these new forums of discussion and collaboration with our customers is because this is the best way we know of evolving our technology and ourselves to better serve you. Let us know how you feel – your thoughts influence us.

In the last 10 years we have built a company that you and we can be proud of. We have developed relationships with our customers, partners, and with each other as an organization that are founded on strong, solid principles. In the next 10 years, we intend to accelerate, gain market share, change the way enterprise software is built and delivered. Many of you appreciated the advanced ideas we came out with ten years ago and the market is now getting it. But we are also ten years ahead again. The strange looks we got when we talked about contexts and ontologies in the early 2000s are now vigorous nods of agreement. We intend not only to ride the crest of this wave, but to define it.

For those of you who have been customers and partners, I thank you for your inspiring partnership over the years, and the ones to come; for those of you who are meeting us for the first time, we look forward to new vistas of possibilities and collaboration with you.

Suresh Madhavan, Ph.D.
CEO, PointCross Inc.