INNOVATION I British Columbia’s technology industry is earning accolades around the world, but it’s not always recognized at home. The B.C. Technology Industries Association’s annual technology impact awards aim to change that, and over the years they have shone a light on companies that went on to become industry leaders. Today, in the first of a weekly series, The Vancouver Sun looks at Victoria‘s PureEdge Solutions, named for the best application of technology in the BCTIA awards.

When the U.S. department of defense decided to modernize the 100,000-plus forms used by army personnel around the world, it turned to Victoria‘s PureEdge Solutions.

At a time when protecting the security of information is a hot button on the corporate agenda, PureEdge clients may find it comforting that the company that is transforming its paper trail with XML forms-based systems has been deemed good enough for the army to trust.

The contract is only one of many scored by the 75-person PureEdge team, but most come from clients far removed from the company headquarters in the scenic ‘burbs of Victoria on West Saanich Road.

If you check out the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, you’ll find the voluminous reporting requirements of public companies there are fulfilled with the help of PureEdge software. If you pay taxes in Los Angeles, chances are it’s on a PureEdge generated form.

The business opportunities are as massive as the mountains of paper corporations and organizations use, and PureEdge’s vice-president of marketing Paul Chan said the problem isn’t finding customers, but meeting the huge and growing demand for their software and services.

“We provide the electronic forms that most organizations run their business on,” he said. “A lot of people, if they think about forms, they think of things like human resources forms, procurement forms, but when you look at it about 80 per cent of every kind of process that happens in a company is governed by a form, and traditionally that is paper.

“It can be as simple as a purchase order form or as complex as the business using them.”

For businesses, pushing paper off the side of the desk and replacing it with the electronic version is not only an environmentally friendly measure; it’s a financial imperative.

The U.S. armed forces conversion to the PureEdge solutions alone will result in annual savings of $1.3 billion US. The forms are used by 1.5 million army personnel.

That’s not just the cost of paper, passing it around, or the price of putting a stamp on an envelope. Organizations that still shuffle paper are becoming an anachronism, as new ways of doing business demand an updated digital approach to business processes. Just ask any supplier of one of the larger retail mammoths how purchase orders are delivered or how far a scribbled-out invoice, faxed or mailed in, would get in their customer’s system.

“It’s transformational,” said Chan of the shift from paper to electronic forms. “Typically when people buy our software, we are providing the software and services around implementing that software and they have a specific core process they are trying to automate, make more efficient, and help them to become more competitive in their industry.”

PureEdge is a spin-off success story from the University of Victoria, launched some 12 years ago by Eric Jordan, now the company’s chief strategy officer and David Manning, researchers at the university who took some of the work they had done in automating images in the fine arts department and used it as the nucleus of the research that ended up with PureEdge.

For a small Vancouver Island company, it plays in a pretty big league, alongside such competition as Microsoft and Adobe. It has more than 200 customers with 300,000-plus organizations using PureEdge products.

“We are probably the oldest young company,” jokes Chan. “People may not have heard of us because we do a lot of our business outside of Canada.

“In B.C. we have done some applications but not nearly as many as you would think.”

The company is reaping the benefits of U.S. legislative initiatives such as the Government Paperwork Elimination Act (GPEA), a trend that the provincial and federal governments here are taking up.

The company builds its solutions based on XML, (eXtensible Markup Language), and early on in its development of the technology won a best-of-show award at Internet World with its digitally signed XML. Earlier this year it won the Accenture and Massachusetts Institute of Technology digital government award for its work with the U.S. army.

It is much more than simply shifting data from paper to a digital form. It’s all about integrating systems in electronic business and e-government, at the same time meeting standards for security, privacy and other issues. Solutions can be complex, taking into account such conditions as the requirements for multiple signature levels for example on a purchase order. “We have ended up being chosen by industry groups as a mechanism for how their members would do transactions within their industry,” said Chan.

For example, the company has created the standardized insurance forms used in 51 U.S. states.

In the case of the SEC, the company had to come up with a solution for the problem of getting public companies to file in such a way that the regulatory body could easily extract the information.

“The SEC was a circumstance where they wanted to solve a very specific business problem,” said Chan.

PureEdge has made a name for itself in security, not surprising for a company that counts the SEC and the army among its clients.

“We got a great reputation working with organization like the FBI and other intelligence organizations in the U.S.,” said Chan. “And the department of defense as you can imagine has very strict requirements around security.

“It ended up making us the best of breed in that category.”

While stepped up compliance regulations might be a headache for corporations and other organizations, they have been the catalyst for the development of such solutions as the ones that are the focus of PureEdge’s business.

“The number one thing driving the growth of net new purchases is compliance,” said Chan. “It can be anything.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005