CFO Magazine’s Company Spotlight: See how eFileCabinet exemplifies the paperless future.
Ed Zwirn, of CFO Magazine, interviewed Matt Peterson to discuss how eFileCabinet helps companies go paperless.
Here is the article:
Company Profile: eFileCabinet and the Paperless Future
You’ve heard it before: The paperless future is upon us. eFileCabinet, a Utah company founded in 2001, is a document management service provider that uses both locally hosted and Cloud-based solutions to help provide “opportunities for people to go paperless,” says eFileCabinet CEO Matt Peterson.
The company, which had its origins catering to accounting firms that needed ways to digitally store records, now caters to many types of companies, with high-profile customers like CocaCola, H&R Block, and the United States Postal Service.
It is due to the presence of larger customers like these that the bulk of eFileCabinet’s business takes the form of providing locally hosted “desktop” solutions. Some 70% of the company’s 70,000 users have yet to migrate to the Cloud, says Peterson.
“The larger organizations, they’re still buying the desktop product,” he says. “The smaller organizations might not have the infrastructure so they are Cloud-hosted.”
“The Cloud is just a different way of delivering the software experience,” Peterson says. “Utilize your network infrastructure or the Cloud, we provide the same user experience for both.”
Far from being worried about security in the Cloud, Peterson says his customers, particularly his smaller ones, consider the “security and redundancy” of the Cloud as “what they like about it.”
“You have that backup redundancy,” says CFO Jeff Coulter. “We use an Amazon Cloud infrastructure and not just in one region but in multiple regions.”
“In the Cloud, it’s all inherently backed up and you don’t have to have an additional server,” he says. “For smaller companies, the upfront investment is much smaller.”
Coulter says that while company products like eFileCabinet Desktop, eFileCabinet Online (a hosted EDM solution), and
SecureDrawer (a portal/file sharing service) are still mainly locally hosted, the growth belongs to the Cloud segment, particularly as smaller companies seek to gain access to them.
“The Cloud makes all of this accessible to the smaller players,” he says. “In this way, we can make going paperless affordable.”
Beyond affordability, Coulter says, using eFileCabinet, particularly via the Cloud, allows smaller-sized companies to participate in technological innovation. “The more SaaS applications that are developed,” he says, “the more you can go into and tap into these databases.”
“What we’re seeing is a much more rapid development of the ecosystem of software going forward,” he adds. In the meantime, the ecosystem for document support providers like eFileCabinet is undergoing more rapid development, and in ways that extend beyond software, per se.
According to Peterson, the original business concept of the company he heads has been greatly complicated by technological development, particularly as the proliferation of mobile devices creates greater demands for flexible access to data.
“We’re in a mobile society and most people don’t want to stay put anymore,” he says, noting that mobile access is already a requirement for “thousands of users” and this is growing.
“You can access using an Android device or IOS in an airplane, or upload documents using a hand-held scanner and store it as a PDF,” says Peterson.
This proliferation of tech advances notwithstanding, even Peterson is forced to admit that the futuristic goal of a paperless office is likely to remain an elusive one.
“I don’t think we’ll ever get to a paperless world” he says. “Paper consumption has gone up 14% over the past 10 years. People keep making three copies for each meeting. . . . The best we can do is to help you be ‘more paperless,’” he adds.