After raising $4.5 million in venture funding two months ago, Encinitas, CA-based Seismic says it is moving up the food chain in content management software.
Seismic was founded three years ago, following a lean startup model. CEO Doug Winter tells me the company used much of that time to build out the basic infrastructure of its Web platform, which enables users to pull live data from various online sources for use in charts, graphics, and electronic documents. Seismic developed its technology for native apps running Windows 8 and iOS, “but we very quickly wanted to embrace the fact that companies have made very big investments in some of these big platforms, like SharePoint.”
SharePoint is Microsoft’s software platform for sharing documents and collaborating on projects within an organization. And now Seismic says it has integrated its technology so companies can use Seismic within SharePoint to create and manage LiveDocs and pull live data into the SharePoint format. The innovative aspect of the deal, Winter says, is that “SharePoint documents are no longer just sitting there. They are live documents that can be updated [through Seismic] with live data feeds.”
In 2010, Microsoft described SharePoint as a $1.3 billion business, with more than 100 million users. Microsoft’s own market research said at the time that 78 percent of the Fortune 500 companies were SharePoint users. The software giant hasn’t officially updated those numbers, although some observers have reported that SharePoint now generates over $2 billion a year for the software giant.
Obviously, gaining access to SharePoint’s market represents a huge opportunity for Seismic. To Winter, SharePoint also represents a more appropriate partner for the suburban San Diego startup. He describes rival content management platforms, such as IBM’s FileNet and EMC’s Documentum as “industrial-weight tools that require a big commitment from IT. Sharepoint is easier to customize and deploy.”
“SharePoint has an enormous footprint,” Winter says. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a Fortune 1000 company that doesn’t have SharePoint, and we get asked about it with almost every deal we enter into with banks, financial services firms, and insurance companies.”
The highly regulated financial industry represents an ideal market for Seismic, Winter says. “Companies that can get in trouble if they say the wrong thing are finding a lot of value in Seismic because we provide the capability to add context [by inserting data] and make other changes while still maintaining overall control.”
