Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major milestone?

Neil Araujo: From a personal standpoint, the year I started iManage in 1995, I also applied to the Kellogg Business School because I never thought iMange would get off the ground. I thought of going to business school and getting an MBA. As iManage picked up steam, I kept deferring my admission. After we went public, I ended up going to business school and then came back to the company in a non-technical role. I was in Marketing.

I made the switch to marketing. A few years after that, we got acquired by Interwoven which was a Silicon Valley-based company. Interwoven got acquired by Autonomy. At Autonomy, I moved into a General Management role. I was running the ECM business at Autonomy, which was iManage plus a bunch of other acquisitions of Autonomy. Then Autonomy got acquired by HP as everyone knows. Then we spun the business off from HP.

Sramana Mitra: That’s when you became CEO of iManage?

Neil Araujo: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: What was the scale of iManage when it was spun out?

Neil Araujo: iManage was spun out in 2015, exactly a year back. We were close to about 175 employees that divested with the business. We didn’t take any of the shared services with us. We had to build that from scratch. We are at about 300 right now.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of positioning, if you were to look at iManage in the context of what the competitive landscape is today, where would you position it?

Neil Araujo: What we do is we make information management software. That’s a very broad category. We focus on a very specific set of verticals. These are customers that create high-value information about the security and the rigour with which those documents are managed. They have pain points and pain levels that’s different from a regular creator of documents. In that market, the folks that we run into most often is someone like OpenText. Have you heard of them?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Neil Araujo: In our market, we tend to win against them most of the time. We’ve done probably 600 conversions from OpenText to our system. We, occasionally, run into Microsoft SharePoint but typically, if you’re with SharePoint, one of us is in the wrong place. SharePoint is a great system but it’s not necessarily purpose-built for the kinds of use cases that we do.

We have some customers who try to build on top of SharePoint to do what we have. Our main differentiator is how tailored we are to this use case of our customer base. It’s the purpose-built nature of what we do both from a performance and a functionality standpoint.

Sramana Mitra: That’s it. OpenText is the only competitor that you deal with. You don’t deal with any of the other players like Documentum?

Neil Araujo: Very rarely. Documentum is focused on process engineering verticals. They are much more work flow and metadata-centric. If you go to pharmaceuticals, they are dominated by Documentum. Let’s take Astra-Zeneca, they would use us in their legal or accounting and use Documentum in their research team. We primarily are on with Microsoft and OpenText. There will be a bunch of other smaller startups that we run into now and then.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo
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