Crawford Technologies is always looking at the future with our current and future customers in mind. The philosophy to give the customer what they want is built into the very fabric of CrawfordTech since the beginning in 1995. Recently, in 2011, we announced the opening of a new office and division in Fort Collins, Colo. With that opening the Archive Management Solutions division of Crawford Technologies was introduced to the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) industry. The product, as some of you may be familiar with, is called PRO Archiver. 

In the past year, we have been providing ECM solutions, but one of the questions we get asked most is how the PRO Archiver product came about. As it is the New Year, we thought this was a good time to take a look back at the decade of innovation and heritage built into the PRO Archiver product—and that is just on the ECM side. PRO Archiver also leverages over 16 years of product development and print-stream document re-engineering technology; the very foundation Crawford Technologies was built on.

 

PRO Archiver traces its roots back to 2002 and the Acartus Corporation based in Fort Collins. That year, Acartus created ApertureONE, a product that sought to answer the need for a scalable and flexible report management solution. Moreover, Acartus wanted this new product to meet enterprise-level needs of the report management market. The success of the scalable and flexible solution was built on the foundation of a plug-in based architecture. This architecture method allowed ApertureONE to be customized so that it would archive to virtually any ECM solution. 

At the launch of ApertureONE, EMC Documentum was the most widely demanded ECM repository used by Acartus customers. This would pave the way for the future of the ApertureONE product and the Acartus Corporation. Flash forward a few years to 2005. This was the start of change for Acartus; the company had continued to develop the ApertureONE product, which was now at Version 1.4 and with their continued success the company was capturing the attention of EMC Corporation. By October, the continued success of the ApertureONE product led to the acquisition of Acartus by EMC. 

At this juncture, EMC renamed ApertureONE to Documentum Archive Services for Reports or ASR as it was commonly known in the ECM market. From 2005 to 2010 ECM continued to grow the customer base for ASR including using document transform products from Crawford Technologies to improve the performance and capabilities. Over the years, many Documentum customers installed ASR so they could store their reports and transactional documents into Documentum.

As many things do, the time for ASR and EMC came to an end with a decision within EMC to refocus their product solutions. In April 2010, Crawford Technologies acquired the rights to ASR and launched the PRO Archiver product. PRO Archiver provides a new product that is compatible with ASR for easy upgrades and provides a number of performance improvements and enhancements that offer the ASR customers many benefits.  Included in PRO Archiver is a new Documentum storage plug-in with improved bursting performance and support for Documentum’s High-Volume Server (HVS).  Additionally, PRO Archiver now includes a new bursting architecture that greatly improves full-burst archiving performance.

In the interim months, Crawford Technologies worked with our development team to create a plan for PRO Archiver. As customers were brought online and positive feedback came back from users, CrawfordTech announced the opening of the new Archive Management Solutions (AMS) division and offices in Fort Collins, Colo., on February 22, 2011. 

The innovation doesn’t stop there as we are planning new announcements for the first part of 2012 to keep PRO Archiver on the leading-edge. Be sure to stay tuned for our latest announcements and webinars.