Founded in 1990, Canto is one of the few companies in the Digital Asset Management (DAM) space that has consistently shown profits. With an employee count of 50, Canto has met market expectations with a sound business approach against stiff competition in the market. The company has been one of the first to enter the market and has helped in defining it. Canto started vending its DAM solution Cumulus initially as a desktop solution for professional photographers. Since then Cumulus now supports over 130 file formats and can be integrated with most publishing software and storage solutions. The product can now scale up to the workgroup or enterprise level supporting hundreds of users.

Cumulus has been very successful gaining acceptance over the past few years with over 11,000 client/server system sold. And given the completion of the technology transition to enable Cumulus to be a core component of the Enterprise infrastructure it is ideally positioned to find widespread acceptance in the corporate world considering austerity measures adopted by corporations and Canto's price that often is a fraction of what customers usually pay for a DAM solution.

In recognition of the company's entrepreneurial drive, innovation and courage to get the latest technology to customers at the most competitive prices in the industry, Frost and Sullivan has recognized Canto with the 2004 Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award.

The following is an interview with the CEO and Founder of Canto, Jennifer Neumann

Movers and Shakers

What was the vision with which you started the company and how have you seen it evolve?

To be very honest when I started the company, being a computer scientist by training, I just wanted to be doing what I love – developing cool software and put something in the hands of people that would be useful for them. Now, after 14 years of doing this, certainly my whole viewpoint on Canto’s business has, by the nature of things, very naturally become more focused on the economics of running a business and I am more of a businesswoman than just a computer scientist. So, what I see now is a need for sustainable business models so that companies that do a good job and deliver solutions to customers are able to continue doing that. I actually think that the whole idea of what many dot com people had, many being successful at it, to basically create something and sell out quickly is something exactly opposite of what we are doing. My engineers are still enjoying developing Cumulus further and we seem to have good luck maintaining our customer base and growing it.

How do you feel about being the only female CEO in the Digital Asset management industry? Are their any unique challenges you face?

I did not realize that I was the only woman CEO in the industry. Though it is hard for me to think of someone else right now, I am puzzled that there is no one else. I can’t believe I am the only one. It’s like the situation being the only human on Earth. But jokes aside, my life has pretty much been busy making sure that my organization is running efficiently and productively and successfully more than 50 percent of my time. Within the organization my authority is not questioned. Externally, I feel I have been in business for too long that I get the same viewpoint. I have also always been surrounded by people who already know me and respect me, so that is what I perceive more than being perceived just as a woman.

You started your company in Germany and have expanded globally. What were the challenges that you went through?

What I actually find almost saddening these days is the amount of bureaucracy that is being built up especially around the legal and financial aspects of a business. I totally understand what lead to all this, seeing the amount of fraud that was committed during the downturn and the damage done to the market and investors and the reason to go after these people. But on the flip-side what has happened is that there is so much bureaucracy now that has come up to prevent the same thing from happening again, and I think people overlook how all this red tape is hurting business globally, especially small start-ups. So either you deal with it, which basically means you have a big cost item and if that doesn’t kill and you try and avoid the paperwork then you are basically playing the lottery and you never know when you step on a land mine and your business has gone.

So going from handling the bureaucracy of one country and taking your business global across continents in multiple countries, you can imagine the challenge that creates…it is almost exponential. So, its one of the things I would say has taken much more of time than anything else. Being the CEO of a software company others get the impression that I spend most of my time helping develop cool software, on the contrary most of my time is spent on just dealing with legal, financial and accounting issues especially because we are a global company.

I actually do believe, contrary to what some world leaders think, that globalization is a very good thing. But at the same time when I see how people end up harmonizing, for example when I look at the European Union, I unfortunately do not see it getting any better for the time being. I am happy that we made it through difficult years and learnt bloody lessons and we pretty much know where the traps and the landmines are. Knowing there can never be full security, I think our business is as secure as can be having been through the worst.

What do you feel are the main points that the Digital Asset Management industry has to focus on to continue growth?

I really think that it is important these days for customers to no longer just have a tool that helps them to get one job done. The age of just having a Photoshop tool retouch an image or have a QuarkExpress to lay out a page, that era is gone. With the pressure to be profitable again these days, company’s need efficiency which translates to workflow because most inefficiencies come from teams not working well together and customers and service providers misunderstanding each other. So network solutions are going to have a big impact and there again we have different approaches. Our approach is through strategic partnerships. Which approach is going to be the best we should find out in the next few years but this factor is going to dominate markets and the companies’ success in those markets, which is how capable they are in allowing customers at appropriate costs to build network solutions.

So do you believe in what many people are now calling ECM (Enterprise Content Management), which includes document management, records management, rights management, digital asset management and web content management?

I absolutely believe in the convergence. If ECM is one acronym, I have recently heard from the whole e-learning world the acronym – ECI which is Enterprise Content Integration and that also makes a lot of sense. Looking at the analogy of car manufactures, BMW sells complete cars though they may be getting components and technologies from other manufacturers. We similarly position ourselves realistically by saying that this is what we do very well. We just believe that the system integrators with their customers are going to select our product or there will be companies that position themselves at a higher level, such as ECM or ECI, who will need our product to complete their solution and with whom we will work with.