By Allan Maurer
ALEXANDRIA, VA—If you’re going to be a professional company, you can’t use Yahoo and AOL email addresses, while Microsoft products such as Outlook have document management limitations. So says Bob Mathew, CEO of CatalystWeb.
Mathew, a serial entrepreneur with two previous successful companies, has funded CatalystWeb to date.
CatalystWeb, founded in 2003, officially launched its product at Demo 2008 at the end of January.
The company offers email, calendar, contacts, document management and instant messaging in a single integrated suite that’s Web-based and priced for small to medium-sized businesses. It is designed so that businesses can scale up as they grow, Mathew tells TechJournal South.
Catalyst is one of 40 innovative Southeastern companies presenting at the Second Annual Southeast Venture Conference in Tysons Corner, VA, Feb. 27-28 (for more information on the conference see: www.seventure.org).
Mathew says Catalyst will eventually seek funding from “investors who agree with our philosophy,” but has not determined its financing requirements just yet. “What’s really important to us is to find someone who shares being an advocate of creating top notch services for small businesses,” he says.
Catalyst employs 30 people and is beefing up its staff on the sales and marketing side.
Enterprise aps not enterprise priced
Many enterprise level applications tend to be too expensive for most small and medium-sized businesses, costing up to $15,000 not counting upgrades for a server-based tool such as MS Exchange. But, free Web mail addresses and relatively inexpensive office products do not provide the flexibility, document management capabilities or image a business needs, Mathew says.
“There’s a need to think about how a small business is really different,” he explains. “They’re not just quantitatively different, they’re qualitatively different and so are their needs. A small business does not need all the bells and whistles a large enterprise does, but it needs a lot more than a consumer.”
Those needs include the ability to share calendars and documents, and a public trashcan where items can be retrieved if accidentily deleted, he says.
Catalyst Office, the company’s flagship service, is a suite of enterprise grade applications that’s not enterprise priced.
It is offered as a 90-day free trial for 1 gigabyte. A company can move up to the next model for $25 a month for 10GB and to $125 a month for 100 GB. The licensing plan is for unlimited users, so a company does not have to worry about adding additional licenses when it hires new people.
Since it’s Web-based, it allows startups the luxury of not worrying about their IT structure, says Mathew.
“We’ve been using it internally for the past two years,” Mathew notes, “and active users have been providing good feedback on what they like and features they would like to see included in future releases. A Web-based service can take those requests seriously and push out changes very quickly, which we do.”
Enhanced collaboration tools and the ability to send voice messages rather than just email are features in the works due to requests, says Mathew.
Mathew sees a large market for the company’s products. “The $250 billion small business market shows great willingness to buy Software as a Service,” he says.
On the Web: www.catalystweb.com
© 2008, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
