David Skok to keynote in Chicago

Knowledge Management Expo show attendees will have the opportunity to hear David Skok discuss how corporations can leverage the Web to build sophisticated new applications combining structured and unstructured information.

Skok is the founder of Watermark Software (Burlington, MA, http://www.watermark.com) and the man who sold it to FileNet (Costa Mesa, CA, http://www.filenet.com) for some $64 million. These days, Skok is doing what he has a history of doing well: starting up a new high-tech company--this time in the burgeoning Internet market.

Speaking of his new firm, SilverStream Software (Burlington, MA, http://www.silverstream.com), Skok said, "SilverStream has developed a next-generation Web applications platform that allows customers to easily develop and deploy sophisticated, Java-based business applications that access both structured relational databases and rich content."

According to Skok, SilverStream offers the first comprehensive solution that includes all necessary components such as security, database access, full-text retrieval and other features. Skok has assembled a management team at SilverStream that includes President and CEO David Litwack (former president and founder of Powersoft, Concord, MA, http://www.powersoft.com), as well as other former execs from Watermark and Powersoft.

Now that Skok has had some time to reflect on the imaging industry, it will be interesting to hear what he has to say about the companies and people he used to compete against. In the past, he has not minced words when the subject was Watermark challengers. Wang (Billerica, MA, http://www.wang.com), which has also since moved out of the imaging industry, is a good case in point.

Miffed when Wang, rather than Watermark, was named Microsoft's (Redmond, WA, http://www.microsoft.com/ industry/docman) preferred vendor of imaging and workflow technology back in 1995, Skok told IW, "I was appalled because they (Wang) had executed our strategy without any talent, without any skill. By pure bullying with the OLE lawsuit (against Microsoft), they pulled off something that we'd worked very hard for, and planned quite carefully, and were close to achieving."

Undeterred, Skok drove a hard bargain with FileNet and did not back down on his asking price. As he said, "Ted Smith went through four weeks of very, very painful thinking." Some would say that negotiating for Watermark was only the beginning of Smith's pain, since he ended up going through the agonizing experience of melding the recalcitrant Watermark sales force with its equally resistant FileNet counterparts.Skok's management style is distinguished by his expertise in critical business functions, including product development, marketing, people management and sales. There have been a few memorable Skok marketing coups. When one of his first companies, an architectural software firm, was on the ropes, he used all $350,000 of its assets to organize a gala conference in Sun City, South Africa, for would-be customers.

The roulette-style gamble paid off in spades. "Even though we forgot to bring our order forms to the conference, we literally did $3.5 million worth of business on the first day, and it ran for five days. By the time we came out of it, our software revenues had grown from $4 million to $24 million in the next year, just in this one event," Skok has said.

Attendees at the 1994 AIIM show in New York will remember Skok's penchant for thinking big. He rented an aircraft carrier, filled it with guests and came off like a modern day tycoon. The cost to Watermark for this extravaganza?

As Skok put it, "Basically, what we were showing there was that if you organize well, your company can seem very, very big when it's actually not that big."

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