VAR's Hybrid Solution Lures Small Businesses

And ADS expects that its hybrid solution will yield a wealth of new business as small companies struggle to control and manage a growing blizzard of paper documents.

The company, which works with the Cabinet NG Shared Access Filing Environment (CNG-SAFE) document imaging application from Madison, Ala.-based Cabinet NG, has found a solid and growing niche with small companies looking to automate many of their business processes, said Roger Veach, CEO and founder.

"I get so excited about this," he said. "It's the only thing I focus on now. The growth opportunities are tremendous."

Because of Cabinet NG's APIs, it can easily be integrated with almost any Windows-based application, Veach said. "I can create an interface with any application within 10 to 30 hours," he said.

Case in point: Beylik Drilling and Pump Service, a Santa Ana, Calif., provider of water well drilling and pump services whose main business is in Hawaii. The company, which prior to the 2004 sale of most of its remote offices did business in 48 states, now focuses on Hawaii and California.

Despite its small size, Beylik has over the past couple of years found itself spending too much money on coordinating business between the two states, said company CFO Robert Horrick.

Traditionally, the complete job file for current projects was kept in Hawaii, while a smaller version was kept in California, Horrick said. As a result, the company was shipping big FedEx boxes filled with project information from Hawaii to California about three times a week, at a weekly cost of between $200 and $300, he said.

Beylik also was spending about $2,000 per month in Hawaii to keep its local IT network running and had an ever-expanding collection of paper files that were threatening to overrun its headquarters, Horrick said.

About 18 months ago, Beylik and ADS started looking at the ocean-spanning business issues and realized that instead of improving coordination between the Hawaii and California networks, it might be better to get rid of the Hawaii network altogether and move to a document imaging system tied to a Microsoft Windows Terminal system.

Horrick said Beylik was open to the idea, as long as it didn't adversely impact the way its employees worked. The company keeps a database for all its forms and business data that employees need to access from their homes and from hotel rooms. It also uses the data to help pay bills and improve their bidding process, he said.

One of the first things Veach did was to pull out the network in Hawaii and began running both states off four Dell servers in the California office. This included a domain server for backup, antivirus and related services; a server for the CNG-SAFE software; one for Microsoft Exchange; and one for Windows Terminal Server 2003. Also included in the installation were 12 Fujitsu scanners, most of which are located in Hawaii.

There is more to come, Horrick said. The next step is to start implementing document flow using the Cabinet NG software. Going forward, the only problem is Horrick himself, he said. "I'm the anchor in this," he said. "I still need to get used to the process."