Entrepreneurs are trained to reach for the stars, but for one Richmond tech innovator, success is found in the cloud.
This fall, ACVITS, a locally developed document management system, was accepted into the Amazon Web Services Marketplace, a digital repository of cloud-computing platforms that will let anyone, anywhere, tap into the resource.
“As a small company, that’s a very big achievement,” said creator Unni Kirandumkara.
Short for “Active Content Vertical IT System,” ACVITS is an online content management system that, in Kirandumkara’s words, “helps to centralize digital files and allow granular access to stakeholders with an ability to track, an ability to audit” who is seeing and editing those files.
The product, which became available through Amazon on Oct. 5, was developed by Kirandumkara’s company, Outsource Online and Consulting (OOAC), which was founded in 2002 but has been working since late summer out of Startup Virginia to develop ACVITS.
While OOAC had focused since its inception on developing complex content management software, working with high-profile clients including the U.S. Department of Forest Services, increasingly Kirandumkara found himself looking toward another niche: small and medium-sized companies.
Particularly as workplaces move toward an increased reliance on collaboration rather than the top-down systems favored in the more hierarchical offices of the past, companies are looking for content management systems that their employees can tap into — albeit to different degrees, depending on the individual’s position.
But these systems can be expensive and hard to manage, requiring specialized technical know-how and troubleshooting skills.
It was with all of these factors in mind that Kirandumkara and his team began to work on ACVITS in spring 2017.
“There are products in this space, but our product is so unique in different ways,” he said. He pointed in particular to ACVITS’ predictive search feature allowing users to search for terms throughout all of their documents, a functionality that he said “is really new to the market.”
Security, too, was a major focus of product development. ACVITS offers users an array of sharing settings, allowing them to make documents shared with others read-only or to prevent the recipient from forwarding or downloading the documents without the sender’s permission. Senders can also track recipients' interactions with a document and limit the number of days it is available.
For Kirandumkara, entering Amazon’s marketplace has been a game-changer — not only to validate his product’s worth, but also for the $20,000 in promotional credit he received from Amazon.
“It was incredible. We were running on a shoestring budget,” he remembered. The success allowed the five-person remote team to jump from what he described as an “extremely struggling mindset” to a position of confidence.
The Amazon connection also meant that ACVITS would be able to run on Amazon’s platform, giving it much greater power and reliability.
“The only dependency is bandwidth,” Kirandumkara said.
Currently, ACVITS operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, with users able to subscribe monthly.
As the company continues to refine the product, Kirandumkara sees a promising market for it in certified public accountancy and law firms, as well as private schools — but is also open to new applications yet undiscovered.
“You never know how the market is going to react or which direction it will lead up to,” he said. “As long as it benefits the end user, I’m a happy person.”
