Hitching your wagon to a star
Just a year or two ago, Keyfile was in the throes of a struggle and seemed to have gotten lost. Their high profile in the early-90s document management and workflow industry appeared to lose momentum by mid-decade.
What was brewing, however, was a single-minded focus on delivering the most robust message-based workflow product possible, tightly integrated with the Microsoft Exchange groupware platform. The result was Keyflow, a feature-rich, messaging-based workflow package.
That focus recently paid off in a big way with the signing of a record 22,000+-seat Keyflow order in Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) at the U.S. Department of Defense, in a joint bid with Microsoft and prime vendor Unisys.
Keyflow may have been the differentiator in a groupware battle between Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. Perhaps more importantly, Keyfile's win at DFAS justifies a decision made five years ago to adopt a distant groupware platform.
In 1994 Keyfile president and CEO Chris Robert came on board and began a wholesale overhaul of the company. He eliminated further development on OS/2 and Unix server platforms and focused all resources on the Microsoft NT platform.
Later that year Keyfile commited to Microsoft Exchange as its sole platform. It was hardly an obvious choice; Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise were outselling Exchange more than 10 to 1.
"With the commitment to NT, we suddenly did not have to worry about porting trade-offs, communications 'plumbing' and other platform issues," said Robert. "We could just focus on document management and workflow applications.
"So I told my team to build the best possible workflow product on top of Exchange, with no constraints -- and they did. Now, we find that our software meets 95% of the workflow needs out there."
Today Keyfile's gamble looks like a sound investment. GroupWise has slipped dramatically with the fall of Novell, and the Notes and Exchange groupware platforms are neck and neck, with over a million Exchange seats per month being sold in the marketplace (more than 15 million sold to date). The momentum is clearly in the Microsoft corner.
"There was a real risk at the time in going away from the Notes direction," Robert acknowledges. "Now, it seems clear to many that Microsoft NT and Exchange have the upper hand, but at that time, it took a lot of planning and analysis to predict."
In addition to embracing Exchange, Keyfile also embarked on a rigorous quality program, beginning with customer surveys to see what Technical Support was doing right and where it needed work.
What Keyfile implemented was a 'closed loop' quality process, while investing in customer service training to ensure that customers were being handled effectively and courteously. Product releases were reduced in size and scope, while frequency was increased. Instead of one big release annually, two smaller, semi-annual releases are now made.
Also, in an unusual move the company reorganized to have Technical Support report directly to the sales VP. "Ultimately, support directly impacts sales," explained Ed McLaughlin, VP of worldwide sales at Keyfile.
What do Keyfile's strategic alliance partners think of the changes?
"Keyfile has been a wonderful organization to partner with," said Rich Noffsinger, director of industry marketing at Microsoft. "They work well with our team and build great DM and workflow products. They made a big investment in Exchange early on, and it has really paid dividends for them."
Australia-based, production imaging provider Tower Technology recently signed a deal to resell Keyflow.
"We extensively evaluated the message-based workflow market, and Keyflow is the absolute best collaborative workflow product out there," said Bill Zastrow, VP of marketing at Tower. "It isn't meant to do the job of production-based workflow systems, but it goes far beyond any other mail-based workflow systems on the market.
"This is simple-to-use stuff that executives can quickly pick up and utilize. It's as easy as setting up an E-mail distribution list. Further, the mail reporting, graphical workflow development and performance statistics are very rich features."
All that adds up to a 50% revenue growth rate in 1998 for Keyfile. But Keyfile is not standing still.
In the fourth quarter of 1998, it acquired F3 Software, whose Professional Designer for Windows (PDW) forms construction and processing product has been used to create approximately 10 million different forms -- more than any other forms design product on the market. F3 also focuses on forms-specific automation solutions that create and distribute forms on the Internet.
The integration of F3 forms technology with Keyflow will strengthen its Web functionality by allowing enterprise forms to be routed to all personnel in an organization, whether they work on thick- or thin-client desktops. It will be integrated with the next release of Keyflow.
"F3's software tools provide Keyflow with a critical paper forms conversion capability that will significantly shorten the time required to incorporate a customer's paper forms into Web-based workflow readiness," Keyfile's Robert said.
Paul Prusa of Empire Fire & Marine (Omaha, NE) said, "This acquisition makes good business sense for Keyfile and F3. As a customer of both companies, I can see the synergy that will develop from the deal. We're pleased with this announcement because we see many areas where Keyfile and F3 complement each other."
And now Keyfile has a record 22,000 seat order from Defense Finance and Accounting Services, thanks in part to Keyflow's strong ties to the Exchange platform.
DFAS' approach is to allow line-of-business managers to author processes with an out-of-the-box solution, while complex process flows will be developed by their IT department. Each department will have its own discrete processes and subflows, i.e. the output of one process is the input to another.
"They wanted a solution that leveraged their messaging infrastructure -- which they were choosing at the same time -- to automate business processes. They also wanted to lay the groundwork for implementing an E-commerce solution," said Roger Sullivan, VP of Professional Services and Strategic Relations at Keyfile.
Five years ago Keyfile made a tough choice to hitch its wagon to Microsoft's groupware star. Today, with the support of customers and vendor partners they're back at the head of the workflow class with eye-opening deals and clout as a groupware ace-in-the-hole.