Ascertus Limited announces today (13 May) that the company has realised a 10 percent year-on-year growth in revenue in 2020-2021, fuelled by a nearly 100% increase in iManage Work document and email management deployments in the cloud.
Ascertus saw notable demand from law firms, especially in Northern Europe, plus accounting firms and corporate departments in many different vertical markets, including the pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, education and financial sectors. Ascertus provides document and information lifecycle management solutions to professional services firms and corporate departments across the UK and Europe.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Ascertus’ CEO Roy Russell said: “90% of our document management system deployments over the past year have been iManage Cloud, and that’s a massive change on previous years.”
Cloud selection and deployments have ranged across firms of all sizes and Russell told us: “We pride ourselves on handling clients of all sizes, from boutique firms of 10-20 users to this year signing two large law firms, one 570 user firm to migrate from on premises to the cloud, and one 900 user firm to migrate from on premises to the cloud.” He added: “There is now a movement among the larger firms to adopt the cloud for their document management systems.”
Large firms that have gone live on the iManage Cloud include Allen & Overy, while Clifford Chance and Baker McKenzie have both selected iManage Cloud but are yet to go live.
The key drivers for the uptake of iManage Work in the cloud across the professional services firms and corporate sector have been the ability to efficiently work from home, business need for agile collaboration similar to that in a physical workplace environment and company IP and data protection.
Russell told us: “COVID-19 helped defeat the emotional argument of not moving to the cloud, because they have had to do it with other apps and the partnership has had to accept it and stop worrying that the cloud is less secure. Covid has helped take that away and when you start factoring in the return on investment now being demonstrated by cloud deployments, that makes it more compelling.”
In a statement out today, Russell says: “Despite the operational difficulties experienced by many in 2020, we ensured that our customer service didn’t suffer. We continued to look after all of our clients and employees whilst achieving business growth without impacting delivery costs and timescales, making staff redundancies or demanding salary sacrifices,” Russell comments. “Last year provided a good opportunity to also take stock, identify areas of improvement across all areas of business and make investments to poise ourselves well for this year and beyond. We are very optimistic about business in 2021 and have good reasons to be upbeat about the future.”
Last year, Ascertus jointly formed an alliance, The Global Efficiency Group, that brought together six leading specialists in information and document lifecycle management, to offer tailor-made solutions to some of the largest international professional services firms and big corporates across the globe.
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