iManage ConnectLive London: changing the way how professionals work

Global News

27
Jun
2017

Rob Ameerun

Today and tomorrow, the annual iManage user conference ConnectLive takes place in London. Customers, partners and other interested parties will spend two days talking about what can be expected from iManage in the near future. Needless to say, the recent acquisition of RAVN is the talk of the day in the O2 InterContinental Hotel in London, where the conference is held.   

During Tuesday's keynote, iManage CEO Neil Araujo pointed out that 2016 was the first full calendar year after the split from HP. The 'new' iManage outperformed expectations: the company experienced a 21% business growth (double from the year before) and the Cloud business grew with a staggering 150%, emphasizing the fact that an increasing number of law firms have no objection anymore to hosting their content in the cloud. Another amazing statistic announced by Araujo was the fact that the 'new' iManage almost tripled employee numbers since the split from HP. Of course, the RAVN acquisition helped with that (slightly over 50 employees).

Araujo set out the three top priorities of the company: Adoption, Security and Cloud. Adoption is seen as the most important priority. The increasing number of new customers (both law firms and in-house legal departments) show that adoption of the 'new' iManage is doing very well. Shawn Misquitta (VP of Product Management) was welcomed on stage to demo Work 10, the most significant upgrade ever. Many new features and a great looking interface - consistent across all devices - is certainly contributing to the increased adoption. 

Priority 2 - security - has been addressed by the introduction of Security Policy Manager (SPM) and Threat Manager. With SPM matter by matter authorization is available (without re-indexing), compliance or IT are no longer the bottlenecks. Another nice feature is the availability of extensive reporting capabilities to support (client) audits.

The third priority for iManage is the Cloud. AmLaw 50 firm Baker Botts is a good example of how iManage Cloud adoption can help law firms driving down costs and increase agility. The 157 years old firm is a relatively new iManage customer (2013) and was working with an on-prem iManage installation. One of the things their new CIO noticed was that a lot of resources were spend on keeping the IT infrastructure up-to-date. That time could be much better spent by focusing on the business side of the firm instead. The decision was taken to migrate to iManage Cloud. The complete project (from signing to go-live) only took 84 days! A total of 55 servers could be phased out after the migration weekend and the users didn't notice any difference (except for an upgraded client).

To address another advantage of the Cloud, iManage co-founder and architect of the iManage Cloud Zia Bhatti was invited on stage to demonstrate that document imports don't have to be done anymore after regular business hours. During his short presentation, Bhatti imported more than 45.000 documents into iManage Cloud just by adding some extra capacity (resources) via a Cloud control panel. 

Rafiq Mohammadi  - another co-founder of the company and currently acting as Principal Scientist - got on stage to explain why the addition of RAVN to the iManage family is so fundamental for the future of the company: "iManage powered by machine learning, we can actually understand content now and do remarkable things with it. iManage is now content aware!" 

The final part of the keynote was reserved for RAVN co-founder Peter Wallqvist. Thanks to the acquisition, his company now suddenly has 'easy-access' to the world outside the UK. After explaining the RAVN framework and highlighting some use-cases, Peter stressed that the combined company's goal is to significantly change the way how professionals work. RAVN will help with that goal by infusing AI into the different iManage systems.