A question that is often not asked is why? Why did we decide to write a document management system? There are plenty of international products playing in this space, and plenty of local products too. Why go in to a market with heavy competition?
I personally have worked in document management and workflow for many years now, working with a broad spectrum of products and companies. What I've found is that the document management market is not so wrapped up as people would have you believe. There are some very, very popular products that are quite simply incapable of doing the job that is normally required.
These products are difficult to use, do not scale well, require armies of consultants and developers, and are inefficient and slow. They force you to focus on their way of doing things, instead of being flexible enough to fit properly into your business the way you want.
On the local side, quality, support and feature set are a problem. Products are usually just slapped together by using purchased toolsets from overseas, meaning that the local suppliers cannot effectively support the software. If your scanner doesn't work, they'll throw up their hands and log the query with the international vendor, who may take weeks or longer to resolve the issue.
I know users don't really care about software design, but it's a big point for me. Many of these supposed "document management systems" are basically just a wrapper over a file share, allowing the systems to be easily compromised. There is a focus on slapping in as many features in as quickly as possible in the hope that some will stick.
At Palantir we firmly believe that technology can be simple and easy to use, as well as being powerful. We saw way too little of that with document management, and felt very strongly that there is a need for that simplicity and power; a need that is not being met currently. That's why we wrote Signate.
In order to ensure that we had a deep understanding of the technologies, we created our own libraries and toolsets. As a bonus this freed us of the usual licensing constraints; which is why Signate client licenses are so flexible; most products require you to buy separate scanning licenses, we don't. It also allows us to more effectively control the user experience; ensuring that our vaunted ease of use is not compromised by technology choices.
So, the simple answer as to why we wrote a document management product?
Because we wanted to; because we felt we could do a better job; because we felt customers were not being well served by the choices in the market up until now; but mostly because it was fun.
Looking for a Document Management System? Signate 2010 is powerful, secure and easy to use.