Document Management Solutions from FileOn

Fairfield County Business Journal: Norwalk firm sees national market

By Bob Chuvala

 

In January, a lawyer friend of Anowar Shahjahan complained about the unmanageable pile of paperwork and filing he faced in his practice.

Not only that, but also "when he is on the road with his clients or in court or at home, he can't access those files," Shahjahan said. "It would be a significant convenience to access his files over the Internet, giving him the freedom to manage his business from anywhere he wishes."

Shahjahan was asked if he could come up with a solution. He discovered that many large companies and businesses were investing millions of dollars to digitize paper files for the Internet, but "it's too complicated for small to mid-sized businesses to tackle."

He saw a niche and created a company to service it, launching his business in October with 15 employees, five pilot customers and two signed contracts.

By the end of the year, his FileOn (www.fileon.com) in Norwalk should have generated about $20,000 in revenues, he said. Very small potatoes, true. But within five years, Shahjahan said, sales are projected to come in at about $25 million.

"We want to become a Dell-like company," he said. "When Dell got started, there was already Compaq, Gateway, HP, IBM and a handful of others making PCs. Dell decided he was going to compete by keeping costs to a bare minimum and quality at the same level or better than competitors, and by streamlining the process to get market share."

Shahjahan's focus is "keeping costs so controlled that it will be difficult for competitors to compete at our price range, by having quality controls as part of our overall process, and by leveraging industry-standard solutions to reduce our overall R&D costs." By taking hardware and software off the shelf, "providing an integrated solution was simpler and easier than growing everything myself."

Full control
Shahjahan probably could have created the solution himself or found people to do it for him. A graduate of Eastern Connecticut State University with a bachelor's degree in computer management sciences and a master's in science and management from Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, he began his career as senior systems analyst for PepsiCo in Purchase, N.Y., before joining MasterCard International in Purchase as director of technology and architectural services.

After four years at MasterCard, he joined Quixi in New York City as chief technology officer and vice president for products and services. The application service provider stalled at its third round of venture capital funding "and we decided to wind down the company in November 2002."

But Shahjahan didn't have all his eggs in the corporate basket. In early 2001, he started his own consulting and outsourcing firm on the side, recruiting computer consultants from India for American companies facing a shortfall of programmers and others with technical computer skills. But when the dot-com bubble burst, the recession began and after 9/11's further trauma to the economy, Shahjahan's consulting service went into hibernation. When it awoke, it awoke as FileOn.

A new world
Shahjahan's optimism about the potential explosive growth of his company is the way he has tied software and hardware together. "There may be a lot of competitors out there, but they're not a one-stop shop for migrating paper to the Internet and providing data storage and access to a rich interface." Clients don't have to buy any software or hardware. "And there's nothing to learn. All a customer needs is access to the Internet."

FileOn offers a courier to pick up files to be digitized, high-speed scanning and digital indexing of the files, warehousing of the paper files, and easy and secure access over the Internet to the digital files by password-protected users. Files are indexed and searchable on a page, folder or content level, "making finding information as simple as typing a word or a phrase," he said.

His primary market is law firms, anything from a firm with three or four people "all the way up to large firms with 50 offices or more." One Brooklyn law firm has 92,000 pages of archives FileOn is digitizing, he said.

His secondary market is medical offices, mortgage brokers, title insurance firms and local governments - just about any business or government agency that generates a significant amount of paperwork that has to be filed away but quickly accessed.

Thinking globally
The Internet not only opens a new world for business, it opens FileOn to the world. "Our business model is to think globally, act locally," Shahjahan said. "Our objective is to partner with thousands of copying, photocopy and scanning companies established nationally as small mom-and-pop shops and give them an opportunity to leverage FileOn services to upload files and give their customers access to their files via the Internet."

In addition, "we are seeking partnership agreements with hardware providers of scanning equipment to bundle FileOn software so customers will be able to scan live files from their office and migrate the files directly to the Internet at will, making us one of the first players to provide live files accessible via the Internet"

Published Monday December 01, 2003

 

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