Glyphica's PortalWare Assists with Document Management

Glyphica, a software company founded two years ago, provides PortalWare products to companies and financial firms such as First American Financial, Wells Fargo, Hambrecht & Quist, Met Life, PalmComputing and Ascend Communications. Its Web-based product provides "sales effectiveness solutions" for companies with complex sales cycles and tiered distribution channels. The product allows a user to scan documents and organize them on a Web portal so they can be accessed by both client and company.

Hambricht & Quist Venture Associates, a user of the PortalWare, took on the software to avoid the arduous task of keeping track of the venture capital firm's large number of investment-related documents. To lighten the paper burden, the firm started using PortalWare so its hard copy documents could be scanned and immediately put on its corporate portal using HTML or PDF files. Unlike an Internet portal, corporate portals are designed to deliver and categorize relevant documents and data that are specific to a company, department or workgroup.

According to Chris Hollenbeck, a partner with the firm, the software is now being used with islands of information on hard drives where it searches for files, term sheets, investment memos and diligence sheets for each investment. The idea is to load this on the Gyphica server and provide access on a privileged basis to team members. "There is no way I would submit all of that to H&Qs Information Services department since it is too time consuming. But now the documents can be scanned or dragged in, so we have a universal access solution that can be deployed to any environment, in many file formats with dynamic linking and indexing," Hollenbeck says. The PortalWare software came with a base price of $72,500, including installation, he said.

The company's products have over 100,000 end users among its 75 customers. Glyphica has industry partnerships with Adobe Systems, AvantGo, Netscape Communications, Sun Microsystems, Siebel Systems and Versant. The venture financed and privately held company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. with offices in New York and Boston.