Firm ventures into offering data mining solution

BY MARICEL E. ESTAVILLO, BusinessWorld Reporter After three years of toiling in product development, a homegrown company is looking to establishing brand recall in the competitive software development market. Paperless Trail, Inc., which holds office in Makati City, will introduce this year its flagship data mining product suite called Perspective. As its name suggests, the solution allows one to "mine" data electronically. "This product is really quite special. There are probably only a few companies in the world with this cutting-edge technology. And we are proud to say that this was developed by a Filipino company," Paperless Trail President Peter N. Morrison told BusinessWorld in an interview. To start, there is the Perspective Professional. A business thematic application that integrates corporate data with location information to provide a manager and his sales team a quick and comprehensive view on how the business is performing. For this tool, Paperless made available information on the top 7,000 companies which is being upgraded quarterly. These companies, which come from all industry sectors, can be either clients or competitors of a prospective user of the solution. By simply looking at the area map that is separated by colors, users can easily identify non-growth and high-growth areas of the business. Users can further investigate by drilling down on the desired areas to view sales and get details of the team that is handling the area. Systems requirements for Perspective Professional include Pentium 4 or higher, Athlon or Athlon 64,256 MB RAM, 64 MB Video and 2 GB of free hard disk space. Included in the suite is Perspective Lite, a GIS (geographic information system) data viewer that enables users to find customers and other information such as streets and buildings with just a few clicks. There is also Perspective Plus, which was described by the company as the business information editor. Ideal for developing territories and routes, this makes plotting of stores, clients and competition easier, said Jay Edades, technical director of Paperless. "This will show immediately the value of the area. Hence, business managers can balance out resources properly. Before you put people in the field, you already know the value of the market," said Mr. Edades. The solution is being leased to clients at P2,000 per user per month. The contract is usually two years. Mr. Edades described the rate as competitive as companies can get away with hiring information technology personnel who are tasked to do the tedious jobs of converting data on hard copy into digitized format. This early, Mr. Morrison said the solution has helped clients demanding fast and reliable information. Its clients include Atlas Copco, Luzon Hydro Corp., Medusa Mining and Nido Petroleum. He said one company client tapped Paperless to convert 600,000 documents into digitized format for a P4-million fee. The process enabled the company to save on cost compared to the traditional photocopy process. "There is an estimate that a document is being photocopied almost seven times in its life. You get rid of this cost when you convert this into digitized format, plus you save up real estate," he said. Mr. Morrison sees opportunities in mining, the government and the Roman Catholic church for birth and baptismal certificates. Paperless maintains only eight developers, three sales persons, four management officials and 24 contractual staff doing file format conversion.