Editor’s note: Earlier this year, e-forms and paper-to-PDF-capture software vendor Cardiff merged with Verity, a company known for its robust search software that catalogs unstructured at the enterprise level--outside of traditional document management systems. Some 260 software vendors license Verity Search, including FileNet, Lotus Notes, Stellent, and Documentum. While the new entity discarded the Cardiff brand, its applications such as TeleForm and LiquidOffice live on as Verity products.

We sat down with former Cardiff CTO and current Verity senior vice-president of development Mark Seamans to see how it all fits together--and to get the company’s long view of where PDF’s going.

PDFzone: What differentiates Verity’s search technology from others?

Mark Seamans: We can search the Internet; [Verity’s Search technology] is more focused on the intranet content, on the 80% of information that is unstructured information, sitting in PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, all of the things that sit out there in networks and in file systems. The company is by far the leader in that space: On a quarterly basis, the revenue from Verity is greater than if you took the next three companies in this space and added them together.

PDFzone: How did acquiring Cardiff fit into its plans?

Seamans: Two reasons: One, Verity was looking to grow organically--which it was doing very nicely--and through acquisition. It was looking for complementary technologies that were related to the types of applications that were deploying Verity search but were non-threatening or didn’t overlap with the OEMs with whom they had already established partnerships.

Secondly, they were looking at where search was used. In many cases, the times we’re looking to search and find information is when we’re trying to pull enough information together for some kind of a business decision--to be able to say with confidence, “This is how to proceed based on this material I’ve pulled together.” With those two things, Cardiff surfaced as a very interesting adjunct to what Verity was doing. We already had partnerships with many of the same people they were partnering with, so there was natural synergy, and in many cases the content flowing out of the back end of our TeleForm and LiquidOffice platform was being stored for indexing and retrieval in the EDMS systems that they were partnering with. So we were hanging around together in the same places.

PDFzone: Where does PDF fit into the picture--just another file format? The standard for business documentation and therefore the top priority?

Seamans: We pay a lot of attention to PDF and we have a lot of technology supporting the format. We have another product at Verity called KeyView, which a lot of our OEMs use for viewing, so we have a PDF viewer independent of Acrobat that can also view about 250 other document formats or converting documents into high-quality HTML for on-the-Web presentation. So we pay attention to PDF there.

We obviously index PDF as part of Search. We spend a lot of time making a very high-performance indexer that can look through those documents, pick out metatags and key information.

In our TeleForm platform, we have the ability to archive scanned paper documents as fully searchable PDFs.

Lastly it is a format we support with out LiquidOffice e-forms automation platform. You design the forms in XML, but you can publish them as PDF, HTML, or InfoPath renditions. At that point it’s up to the client to decide which format makes the most sense.

PDFzone: How does Verity position the former Cardiff PDF forms solution against what Adobe offers now?

Seamans: At the core, it’s getting away from the technology part of it: Between Cardiff and Verity--Cardiff was started in 1991, Verity in 1988--you’ve got two companies that have had that amount of time working with enterprise corporate clients directly to deploy enterprise-class solutions in the IT environment.

In its history, Adobe, until today focused on multi-tiered distribution. Shrink-wrapped boxes, high-revenue leverage--fantastic model, but completely different than the enterprise build model: Presenting and interacting with clients, doing discovery of processes, investing with them in design of solutions, negotiating contracts that are tremendously flexible, and rolling out the professional services staff to make them go live.

I think a lot of these IT guys are saying “I don’t want to just buy a server. I want to partner with an enterprise supplier. I want a relationship with you, you’re going to come in and understand my business, and we’re both going to have our neck in the noose together and make this thing go.”

There are many differences, but the largest is that, when we wake up in the morning, we come in to work to solve process automation problems and connectivity problems. We’re not building formats and doing a bunch of other things. It gives us a really strong ability to work with our customers.

PDFzone: In Verity’s best interest, you obviously must remain format-agnostic in the forms space. But from what your clients are doing, can you tell us how PDF is faring compared to InfoPath and HTML in the forms sector?

Seamans: It’s early for InfoPath. To do everything, filling-wise, you have to buy something. You can view a form [for free], but you can’t do anything with it--fill it in, route it, interact with it--without buying a four-seat purchase. I think that that fact is probably slowing some of its adoption. We have customers who are interested in it, but currently the fact it’s a 4-seat format, it limits it: You can’t use it in a Web-based application for your customers, for example.

I will say, that’s quite similar, in practice, to PDF. You can do some things with PDFs--view a form, fill it, print it--but if you want to digitally sign it, and save it locally on your machine, somebody’s got to buy something.

As broad as PDF is deployed, HTML has the maximum reach. It comes up on anyone’s machine, 100% guaranteed you can see it.

PDFzone: Last week on PDFzone, one of your former colleagues, Robert Weideman--now at ScanSoft--suggested that Adobe was beginning to make PDF more proprietary with features in Acrobat 7 in which users of Acrobat 7 Pro can enable review and commenting in the free Adobe Reader 7.

Seamans: I agree that, the more that Adobe does--on one hand, echoing the benefits of the open nature of the PDFs, yet on the other, adding secret-sauce capabilities that only they have access to--yeah, that’s going to close out the developer community and it’s going to push people to look at alternative formats.

PDF wins today because of that broad support, this ecosystem around PDF of people being able to get in there and add value and do things with it. The more that they start adding things that only they’re able to do, they more they open themselves up to risk for people jumping ship. [PDFzone] mentioned [two weeks ago in an editorial accompanying the release of Acrobat 7] the potential for Microsoft doing something; as soon as some alternative comes along that allows a lot more extensions. It’s the work of the independent software vendor community around Acrobat that has made Acrobat--in many cases--successful as opposed to the core stuff. There’s been many great third-party annotation, markup, and review tools that have guided that way to pervasive use of the PDF format.

From a business perspective, however, I respect that there have been how many hundred million Readers downloaded. Unfortunately, the most stinging word for them to hear, business-wise, is the “free” Reader, which means, if you’re Adobe, “700 million downloads, no money in my pocket.” That means you’ve got to find some way to monetize that.

I respect that they have to find some way to monetize that. I just thingk that the wrong way is precluding third parties to having equal access, which is the wrong way in the long run for Adobe. It’s a delicate road for them to walk.