A 10 year-old document management company with only 125 customers worldwide which decides to exit its core business, rename itself, and go for a $50m to $100m Nasdaq listing barely 12 months later, has to have a gimmick. Factpoint Inc’s is that it can, it claims, ensure the accuracy and reliability of its customer’s web content.
The Burlington, Massachusetts company was created last month out of the going-nowhere-business of enterprise document management system developer, NovaSoft Systems Inc. Its mission, said marketing VP Rod Hodgman, is about embedding trust in web content. Or, put another way, by developing a branded web content certification system, Factpoint thinks it can turn its new name into a signature of authenticity and accuracy in the eyes of web site owners and their customers alike. That could certainly be worth $100m, but only if nobody else beats the company to the draw.
So far, claims Hodgman, there is no one playing in the same space as Factpoint, but that may not be the case for long. There is certainly a need for the product and service Factpoint wants to sell. Last year, for instance, on-line discounter, Buy.com, found out about the perils of web content inaccuracy the hard way, when it posted the price of an Hitachi monitor at more than $400 less than it was meant to be. Buy.com chose not to honor the orders of the dozens of on-line buyers that rushed to snap up this bargain. Now Buy.com competes against a site called boycottbuy.com, but at least it hasn’t suffered the same high-profile embarrassment of PairGain and Bloomberg. These took credibility beating when a disgruntled PairGain worker published a news story on Bloomberg’s web site.
Factpoint’s answer to this problem is an X.509-based digital signature system which acts as a certification scheme for web content. Either by coupling the signature system to Factpoint’s old NovaSoft workflow engine, or by linking with any other suitable systems, such as a Vignette content management tool, users can set up structured alerts and authorization procedures which make it far more difficult, if not actually impossible, for the wrong information to appear on a web site.
Essentially, individual pieces of web content, such as product pricing, or company notices, cannot appear on a web site until they have received the appropriate digital signature. Then, once they have, they are cleared to be published to any website governed by the Factpoint certification scheme, including those of customer affiliates, such as the dealers of General Motors, a company which is likely to be among the beat testers of Factpoint’s system as it is made available in the next quarter.
Technically, there is really little to what Factpoint is doing, although, by the time the second version of the system arrives before the end of this year, says Hodgson, the company will have moved on to issues of safeguarding zones in web sites, which will up the technology ante. However, for the moment, anyone that understands how to deploy X.509 digital signatures, and MD5 checking algorithms could do what Factpoint is doing.
This is why, says Hodgson, the whole thing is about market share, and why the company is in an unseemly rush to raise that IPO. Even before then, Hodgson says he needs at least five high-profile web site owners to take the Factpoint certification system, posting the Factpoint brand as a mark of authenticity, in exchange for a flat $100,000 fee including all software and a year’s maintenance. At that point he can press the accelerator on plan B: selling the Factpoint certification system direct to major e-commerce software developers, such as IBM, Oracle and Sun. Those companies will then become Factpoint’s chief route to market, and possibly, the chief investors in its IPO in 12 months time.
