Document management firm invests €5m


22 May 2007

A total investment of €5m has been committed by an Irish electronic document management company as part of its bid to become an international player.

Cork-based BridgeDoc, formerly known as ScanData, is investing in extensive infrastructure and data centre space in Ireland and the US to capture lucrative business opportunities driven by compliance rules such as Sarbanes-Oxley

The company has already secured a deal with a California-based software and hardware company called O’Neil Software that will see its service made available in 63 countries.

BridgDoc chairman Bill Kearney told siliconrepublc.com that the company’s online paperless records service bridges the divide between electronic and paper documents and prevents companies losing vital documents.

Loss of compliance documents currently cost millions in fines because of breach of compliance regulations.

He said the service is designed to offer banking levels of security and to be compliant to a host of regulatory requirements such as HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley and 21 CFR Part II.

He added that the company delivers along the software-as-a-service (SAAS) model. “We are working with one of the major data centres in Dublin that also hosts some of the world’s top search engines.

“Customers of the service would range from multinationals to county councils and central government.

“We have just launched into the US and a major medical research company has signed up as a client. Our sales strategy would be to get a number of direct sales ourselves as well as working with value added resellers offering offsite document storage to clients,” Kearney said.

The €5m investment is broken down as follows: €3m has been invested so far on development to date and this will be followed by a further €2m on a worldwide marketing campaign.

It is understood that at present 2-4pc of a typical company’s paper documents are misfiled and 7.5pc are completely lost.

With 0.8 billion paper documents produced in Europe each year rising to 1.4 billion by 2008, at least 64 million documents will be lost by European businesses every year.

By John Kennedy