That seven-year itch said to afflict long-term relationships doesn’t worry IntegrationWare CEO and president Dave Kraft, who helped start the company in 1993 to serve the booming market for corporate knowledge-management software.
Kraft, a former Ernst & Young information technology consultant, along with co-founders Jeff Grammer, chief technology officer, and Rod True, vice president of customer service, are taking IntegrationWare through a major expansion following the company’s first influx of venture capital. In October 1999, IntegrationWare scored $7 million in first-round financing from William Blair Capital Partners LLP of Chicago.
Their bootstrapping days behind them, Kraft and his co-founders are focused on further developing and marketing their flagship product, IntraBlocks, which they call an enterprise knowledge portal.
Kraft says IntraBlocks is several steps ahead of basic corporate enterprise information portals (EIPs), which provide a view-only access to selected enterprise-wide information such as contacts, contracts, sales figures, meeting minutes or even the menu at the company cafeteria.
IntegrationWare’s product allows a business to give employees and trusted partners access to just about every piece of data the company has stored, but it also lets users leverage their collective insight by working together on projects or linking related pieces of information.
The software comprises three primary components, Knowledge Objects, the Knowledge Object Server and a Web interface. Via its advanced middleware component, IntraBlocks can integrate and transact with any source of information or any application, including networked hard drives, company databases, archived e-mails or electronic desktop organizers.
Kraft calls the process “building a knowledge-sharing community.”
IntegrationWare has come a long way since its humble beginning of three men and a basement. The company, which recently made a few executive-level hires and added to its board of directors, now has approximately 80 employees who work out of offices in Buffalo Grove.
Kraft spoke with Silicon Prairie about the challenges of managing the company’s growth spurt, going global while retaining a hands-on approach and evolving from a service company to a product company. The following is a transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity.
Q: You and your co-founders left successful and established jobs in IT consulting to found IntegrationWare seven years ago, long before the start-up bug bit in the Midwest. Why?
A: We knew each other a long time before 1993, and we all worked for Ernst & Young at one time. We all could see a shift in the early 1990s as distributed technology was becoming more powerful for business applications. Prior to that people had their spreadsheets, word processors and PCs. We started talking about it and meeting on weekends. One of the drawbacks of working for a big firm is you continue to do what you are specialized in, and we wanted to explore new ideas. We wanted to innovate a business model of providing systems solutions.
We saw a market need. Big businesses were used to a model that was large-scale and expensive. We looked at technology and saw the chance to drive value for businesses by creating solutions without the high cost. We had tremendous conviction that we would be successful. We weren’t arrogant about it, but we had a lot of confidence that the market would grow and we clearly knew we came early to the game – we had a home court advantage, so to speak.
Q: Naturally you started in a basement?
A: Absolutely; like all good start-ups we began in the founder’s basement. It wasn’t terrible; we had drywall, folding tables, a phone, a couple of PCs, some $20 chairs. The nature of Ernst & Young is that it is about relationship-selling, and we knew how to do that.
Q: How does IntraBlocks drive value for a business?
A: Other enterprise information portal software does a good job of taming the diverse information available across intranets and the Internet, but it deals only with information. IntraBlocks is something more. It’s an enterprise knowledge portal that recognizes that most corporate knowledge is sitting around inside the heads of employees, who digest these vast amounts of data. Our solution is to provide knowledge management in collaboration with capabilities. The software provides interactivity among users to manage a company’s resources, projects, intellectual capital and its customer relations. This enables effective enterprise decision-making and drives value.
Q: How do your customers use IntraBlocks?
A: Our customers can start building a knowledge-sharing community right out of the box, but actual applications vary tremendously. Abbott Laboratories is using it to enhance its supply-chain management system, and the University of Quebec is using IntraBlocks to enable worldwide, virtual teaming on specific projects. You can use the software for data warehousing, employee education and customer relationship management – anywhere collaborative use of data and decision making is required.
Q: It seems as though the current push in the IT industry is toward providing a service or services, yet you seem to be going in reverse. After starting out as a “service company,” why have you evolved into a “product company?”
A: We continue to provide service through partnerships we are forming, and we are heavily involved with training in the use of the technology. Basically, our software is a service – the result of years of consulting with our clients. We continue to listen to our customers, and they get the tools they need to custom-develop their own unique knowledge-sharing community based on their needs.
But we are evolving. Right now, we are focusing on the product side because we see it as the future. We are making the product innovations that will change the way we automate the things we do.
Q: Would you do things differently if you were launching IntegrationWare today, rather than in 1993?
A: Overall, no. Today we might look to grow more rapidly, leverage capital to be profitable from Day One and get more products out faster. But we always tried to create a culture where we weren’t here just to generate numbers. We’re here because this is what we want to do and we want to do it well and we get a lot of professional satisfaction out of it.
