Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What’s on the cards now?

Neil Araujo: We’re about 300 employees. We don’t disclose our top-line revenue as a private company so I’d rather stay away from that. First of all, there’s some extremely fascinating things that are happening in the tech space whether it’s in academic research or analytics and Big Data, or the ability to write truly transformative applications as well as how it can transform business models for our clients.

At the same time, the whole professional services space, particularly the law firms, is seeing a ton of change. There’s a lot of pressure on security. There’s a lot of pressure by the end users for tools that work more like the consumer tools that they are used to using at home. All of these things are driving change in enterprise software that’s probably unprecedented. It’s almost like we are in 1995 and writing a whole new generation of software.

You’re seeing the same thing happening now with enterprise software. It is actually catching up with what’s happened in the consumer world in many ways. We are going through that journey of transformation. As part of that journey, we will increase the footprint of the kinds of things we solve for our customers, which then enables us to grow from one application into multiple applications that solves other problems in our customer base. Our strategy has always been to grow within the vertical rather than to jump out of what we do.

Sramana Mitra: But your solution is not vertical. It’s a horizontal solution.

Neil Araujo: It’s a horizontal solution that is applied to a very specific type of users. It’s accounting users. It’s banking users. You can use it across an entire enterprise but typically somebody would use a SharePoint or OpenText for that.

Sramana Mitra: When you think about product strategy of how you want to expand out of this one focus area, what is the organizing principle of your product strategy?

Neil Araujo: At the end of the day, what we do is, what I would call, project-centric management of information. Our products manage the lifecycle of that entire project. Users use us across an entire value chain of that project from the creation all the way to when the project has ended, and ultimately, deleted. It’s that end-to-end lifecycle, which includes sharing that project with your client and collaborating with your client online. It includes records management. It includes some lightweight discovery

Sramana Mitra: You’re plugging more and more of the gaps in that workflow. You’re basically completing that workflow.

Neil Araujo: Exactly. We’re completing that workflow and we’re using the big change of what’s happening in our software to provide compelling events for people moving off legacy systems for those gaps.

Sramana Mitra: Anything else you want to provide in terms of metrics? How many customers do you have?

Neil Araujo: We’ve got 3,000 customers.

Sramana Mitra: Is there any bias in that customer base?

Neil Araujo: About half of them are law firms and other half are non-law firms – corporations, banks, insurance companies, corporate legal departments. We are global. We have offices in the Valley, Chicago, Belfast, London, and in Bangalore. Just in the last year, we’ve added about a hundred people. We have a big focus on the cloud. That’s where a lot of our new business is coming from.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo
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