Appatura
Content Management Driven by Granular Control

The Information Technology and Web Science class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is rapt with attention as Richard M. Plotka scribes on the board a diagram depicting a hybrid database that reduces content into discrete granular elements to tackle the problem of erroneous content from getting published. The hybrid database that forms the fulcrum of Appatura’s inventive Content Management Solution (CMS). Characterized by the flexibility and granularity of this intuitive database technology, Appatura offers a comprehensive CMS for content curation and assembly; document creation and publishing; and the ultimate dissemination of legal, financial and compliance documents for the Mutual Fund and Private Accounting industries. Appatura takes Enterprise Content Management (ECM) a step ahead by leveraging this granular hybrid database along with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to track the content and repurpose it for maximum effect. This eliminates the hassle of manually coordinating a small content change across a variety of documents and platforms across the enterprise.

“At Appatura we believe that organizations, facing increased demand for accuracy, focus primarily on the last leg of the content life cycle—distribution and publication—however there is a pressing need to better manage that content with accuracy within the organization. Only by focusing on the entire life-cycle of content creation through distribution, will companies be able to achieve consistent dissemination of message and maximize their ROI.” says Plotka, CEO, Appatura. To elucidate, in the enterprise world, content is generally sourced from multiple isolated systems, or ‘islands’, that do not share a common contextual knowledge base, often leading to duplication and inefficiencies, increasing the risk of publishing the wrong content. In order to overcome these challenges, Appatura’s content engine—Syntext—allows customers to manage content from a single, integrated, central content repository.

Utilizing various user-centric applications that the company has created around the Syntext ecosystem, users can pull and push the content to whatever medium required for publishing. The output format may range from PDFs, compliance and shareholder reports, audit statements, to tweets, Facebook posts, or blogs. This provides a holistic view of ECM as opposed to the traditional solutions that target specific needs such as document management, document publishing, and/or web publishing.

Automating Content Management with AI

The ability to scale content stands above traditional CIO challenges in the areas of workflow, control, cost and, schedules, which are inherently addressed by Appatura. “According to studies, 2.5 quintillion bits of data are created every day! Over 100,000,000 spam emails are sent every minute,” highlights Plotka. “When you consider the amount of content being utilized to generate this data and these emails, it is clear that without an ECM, and without one that handles content at the component level, companies will be at a tremendous disadvantage.”

Our AI-based tools comb through a content library in a relatively short amount of time and transform the way asset management organizations create reports

This is where Appatura’s ability to leverage AI delivers value, reducing content into its basic form, organizing it in the hybrid database and analyzing it in the AI (appaSense). The company’s technology reduces content to its elementary form, adding words and numbers to their database, much like accountants that work with numbers in a spreadsheet. This results in automation at an advanced level, to the extent of being able to automatically send out tweets when a piece of content, like the Morningstar rating on a mutual fund, changes. Through robust content analytical algorithms, Appatura solves the complexities of content discovery and assembly tasks, reducing operational inefficiencies.

With highly functional workflow applications like Docubuilder and appaDocs, and the AI dimension of appaSense, Appatura’s clients save time and focus on the tasks which matter to them most. In the case of Mutual Fund and Private Accounting companies, this also results in a reduction in human errors that often lead to undesired results.

Innovation that Delivers

“Most hedge funds and mutual funds are obligated to produce copious amounts of content,” explains Plotka. “Our AI-based tools comb through a content library in a relatively short amount of time and transform the way asset management organizations create reports.” In one specific case, a customer which managed 100 fund with 20 people, now manages 150 with only four allowing the other 16 to do the work for which they were originally hired. Moreover, what used to take weeks is now accomplished in days. Appatura takes pride in bringing a consultative approach to such customers, learning and building subject matter expertise as a professional services company.

A well-established and seasoned ECM solutions and service provider, Appatura has proven capabilities in staying abreast of technological trends that disrupt traditional content management models which are sporadic and inefficient in nature. The database conceived and institutionalized by Plotka 25 years ago has undergone multiple rounds of innovation to the present-day granularized ECM engine, Syntext. The tenets that have remained constant however, are putting the control of content back into the clients’ hands, allowing them to repurpose the data with semantics and intelligent tools, and providing an overall experience that is robust, cost-effective and flexible.

“We reinvest our earnings into appaLabs, which is our skunk works in Upstate New York,” says Plotka. The company’s developers work with academic experts from higher education, customers, and subject matter experts in an open-door policy manner to prototype and implement new features. With the advent of new channels like voice interaction and speech recognition, Appatura continues to remain medium-agnostic, while taking content generation to the next level. Envisaging a future where most of the content will be machine-generated using specific data points, Appatura prepares itself with a customer-centric focus, robust automation and AI tools, and an innovative zeal.