Document Database Eases Paper Chase of Gangs

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Document Database Eases Paper Chase of Gangs
Chris Wacker at Laserfiche’s headquarters in Long Beach.

Violent crime in Long Beach, where street gangs have long stirred up trouble, hit a 40-year low last year thanks in part to a local technology company.

The Police Department in the city of 465,000 began using technology from software developer Laserfiche on squad car laptops three years ago that allowed officers to access documents they needed to identify gang members they believed they had cause to arrest.

Ed Ivora, an administrator in the Long Beach Police Department’s records division, said what used to take officers hours to confirm by telephone now takes mere minutes. As a result, more gang members are arrested in Long Beach today than in years past.

“In 2009, before the system was in place, we had 35 arrests,” he said. Last year, that number jumped to 269.

The department was honored last month for its innovative use of technology to fight crime by the Computerworld Honors Program, a Framingham, Mass., non-profit that promotes social change through information technology.

The accolade is also a notch in the belt for Laserfiche, a company that has been growing almost as quickly as its technology has advanced.

Even through the recession, the size and scope of complex data files has grown unabated, and Laserfiche, whose software allows companies to manage those files, has also been able to grow, opening offices across the world and adding to its employment base.

Co-founded in 1987 by Nien-Ling Wacker, its chief executive, and Chris Wacker, its executive vice president, Laserfiche designs and develops software programs that organize both paper and digital content into searchable online repositories. The company works with organizations in a variety of sectors, including education, financial services and government.

The company claims more than 32,000 customers across the world, up from 28,000 in 2010. In addition to the Long Beach Police Department, its local clients include USC, Molina Healthcare Inc. and the city of Santa Monica. The Mexican Department of Immigration is the company’s largest customer, though Chris Wacker, now married to Nien-Ling Wacker, said the company is vying for even larger entities.

“We have to support larger and larger repositories because information is growing by leaps and bounds,” he said. “It used to be that, years ago, it was only print, but now it’s electronic at least as much as print, and that’s certainly the way of the future.”

The company’s latest iteration of software – Laserfiche 9 – launched earlier this year and has the capability to handle ever-larger collections of information by distributing processing loads across multiple servers.

Wacker said that the business has been growing consistently, with revenue rising at least 10 percent each year since 2008. In 2012, revenue grew by more than 25 percent over the prior year.

“This year, we’re on track to grow (sales) by more than 30 percent,” he said. “It’s really remarkable.”

The company last made its sales figures public in 2006, when it had annual revenue of $24.7 million. Based on its claimed rate of growth, the company is estimated to have revenue of about $50 million last year.

Stacks of facts

Nien-Ling and Chris Wacker co-founded the business in the mid-1980s primarily as a tool for attorneys who needed to weed through stacks of paper documents seeking specific information. The idea was to create software that would allow people to scan paper documents into a computer as image files, then quickly search through those files for any word, phrase or number.

The company grew slowly at first, as the idea behind the software was more advanced than the technology necessary to implement it.

“At that time, PCs were just making an appearance on the market and memory was horrendously expensive,” Chris Wacker said.

In the nearly three decades since the company opened, it has updated its software and identity to keep up with technology. First known as Laserfiche Document Imaging, the company has since pared its name to better reflect the growing capabilities of its software. Today, Laserfiche can process, file and search many types of documents aside from text, including PDFs, audio and video files, fax images and even drawings or architectural blueprints.

Laserfiche sells its software through about 600 independent resellers. In the past five years, the company opened offices in London; Panama City; Shanghai; Toronto; and Washington, D.C., to better support its sales network. The company, which five years ago employed about 200 people, now employs 400, with 275 people at its five-story Long Beach Boulevard headquarters.

Alex Wilson, who founded Wilson Automation Technology LLC in Long Beach about six months ago, is betting his livelihood that Laserfiche is still near the start of a drawn-out growth phase. A Laserfiche reseller, Wilson plans to sell the company’s software to higher education institutions, including trade and technical colleges.

He said he believes the market for the kind of content management solutions Laserfiche makes is strong, if tempered by recessionary attitudes.

“My impression was that a few years ago, especially before 2008, people had money they were willing to part with more readily when it came to these kinds of business decisions,” he said. “Now, people are willing to spend money, but they take their time to think about it.”

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