Systemware Inc
Beyond Intelligent Information Management

‘Big data is not an ephemeral phenomenon. On the contrary—it is here to stay.’ With a significant proportion of the data deluge being unstructured, organizations need an efficient way to capture, index, and archive this influx of content. Metadata is a great way to organize unstructured data for fast retrieval and analysis, but that too must be stored and managed for obvious reasons. For firms in search of solution providers, one company has been the go-to player—Systemware. A popular name in the enterprise content management (ECM) space, Systemware has been in the business for nearly four decades—catering to some of the nation’s largest and most successful companies. The company captures, analyzes, curates, and secures each organization’s information effectively and efficiently.

Systemware provides ECM solutions that find and extract data from disparate sources, then transform and deliver meaningful information in the related context. “Everyone needs to have a centralized place to find information across the organization, and we provide an efficient model to do that,” states Patrick Sheehan, the VP of Development at Systemware.

Systemware’s high-volume content management solutions are leveraged by companies across a range of industries, including finance, insurance, healthcare and retail, to facilitate more informed business decisions, capitalize on information assets, and support compliance objectives.

Pioneering Technological Developments

Systemware has enjoyed continual success over the years and their ever-expanding solutions continue to be in high demand. Systemware began by managing data from the mainframe, then expanded to manage more content from more locations, which eventually led to their cloud solution that can be deployed wherever customers need it: on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid solution. “Even when we were managing the computer-generated output from mainframe systems, our real focus was on metadata,” says Frankie Basso, the president and COO of Systemware.

Today, Systemware helps customers effectively and efficiently connect, manage, and enable billions of documents. The company’s solutions support the changing environment of content, while continuing to respond to the evolving needs of customers. Systemware has developed solutions that streamline the flow of documents and information through a variety of business processes.

An important step that Systemware took was to provide practical and efficient management of unstructured data with robust metadata helping to provide structure, meaning, and usefulness to content. Systemware’s Content Cloud Find Engine, a recent capability of their solution, efficiently stores and manages metadata, contributing to the success and viability of any enterprise content services environment. The Find Engine delivers fully vetted data from unstructured content while indexing, organizing, securing, compressing, and encrypting both the metadata and the content. The solution distributes this metadata across multiple nodes to support a MapReduce data processing model, while providing multiples levels of failover and redundancy.

“Addressing ‘Big Metadata’ and the rising tides of information chaos is a prerequisite to solving the digital transformation puzzle,” mentions David Basso, the VP of Sales and Marketing at Systemware.

Re-engineering Enterprise Content Management

Even before Systemware pioneered a solution for big metadata, they needed to help their customers move beyond the status quo of their burden of siloed information and the associated high cost and inefficiencies of legacy storage and retrieval.

As customers implemented enterprise-wide solutions, or considered consolidation of content from legacy storage, the conversation most often shifted to concerns of time-intensive processes and expensive migrations. Again, Systemware pioneered a solution born out of customer need. To simplify the migration process, they developed the Legacy Archive Processor (LAP) which builds references to documents previously archived by legacy systems, eliminating the need to convert the source data. When a user asked for information that happens to be stored in a legacy system, LAP automatically retrieved the data from the legacy archive media. To enterprise users, legacy and new content were all accessed using a single interface, and content could be retrieved as needed. This methodology connected disparate information sources and provided customers federated access to that legacy information without intensive delays that often come with porting complete content repositories all at once.

This migration methodology is one that has been developed over years of partnering with large organizations dealing with petabytes of data and complex environments. Because they understand every situation is different, there are multiple migration options— migration all-at-once which includes decommissioning the legacy archive; partial migration while allowing some legacy systems to remain in place while providing access to content from a single place; and ad-hoc conversion that connects to legacy systems and migrates individual pieces of content as users request them.

A Personalized Content Management Experience

Long before the industry focus shifted from ECM to content services, Systemware saw what was happening within its customer’s environments and identified a need to connect data between users, systems, applications, and repositories. In fact, this was one of the reasons for developing the data migration methodology. Once again, Systemware pioneered to deliver the next generation of information management.

We not only understand clients’ technical objectives but also their business needs and enhance the software around those factors

Content Cloud is the culmination of years of identifying customer needs and developing solutions that helped modernize IT environments, enhance interoperability, and automate workflows. But one very important component to the solution is providing a personalized experience. From enhanced user-productivity with workflows, scripting and automation to the robust federated search capabilities to extraction on-demand using line-level, page-level and document-level indexing to access just the content needed.

“Content Cloud increases our customers’ agility when interacting with their own customers—creating competitive advantages and innovation flexibility while delivering a solution that helps them meet their compliance, security, and privacy requirements,” states Pat Sheehan.

The Road Ahead

The success metrics of Systemware has been strictly focused towards understanding the clients' needs first and then build a solution that would meet them. Sheehan mentions, “Many product ideas come directly from our customers and their very real business requirements.”

Systemware listens to its clients, leverages novel and emerging technologies accordingly to create solutions that can benefit every customer. “We undertake the suggestions that our customers provide us with and work closely with them to comprehend them. This helps us in initiating smart decisions to deliver the best and most supportable software,” informs David Basso. Sheehan adds, “We not only understand clients’ technical objectives but also their business needs and enhance the software around those factors.” Working closely with their customers gives Systemware the opportunity to establish a direct relationship with them. This allows them to comprehend the client business challenge and develop a comprehensive solution by working with the development team in enhancing and modernizing the software. Systemware also hosts monthly meetings with prime client stakeholders to discuss enhancement ideas and other opportunities. This information is reviewed in a monthly Enhancement Committee meeting that helps define the tactical and strategic product roadmap.

For Systemware, a successful implementation does not mean the end of a sales-cycle, but the beginning of a long relationship, an idea that they instill in every organizational process, including their team building strategies. “We have a close-knit work culture which replicates an extension of a family who strive to succeed together with respect,” says Frankie Basso. Systemware currently serves customers in a variety of industries ranging from financial services, insurance, healthcare, and retail markets. “We help some of the world’s largest and most highly regulated organizations simplify infrastructure, optimize cost, improve workflow efficiencies, and meet information governance requirements,” elaborates Sheehan. Rightly, so, Systemware’s office has a family room that makes the employees comfortable and collaborates with each other to produce new thoughts and ideas.

"Content Cloud provides users a personalized content management experience; allowing clients to store data where it makes sense for them"

As a privately held company, Systemware can make decisions based on long-term, client-centered objectives rather than shareholder imperatives. The company has been helping its clients for decades to simplify ECM strategies and has undoubtedly become the answer to solving the complexities of content management today. “We have customers that are running mainframe data centers and looking to make the move to the cloud. We are uniquely positioned to facilitate their transition from legacy to cloud,” states David Basso. As more companies move to public cloud, Systemware stands at the ready to deliver containerized software deployment options for AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and IBM. “As technology shifts and the stability and security of the cloud continues to be proven, organizations are shifting operations to the cloud. We continue to support our customers as they innovate in this area—allowing them to migrate mission-critical applications without compromise,” concludes Pat Sheehan.