By Ian Wimbush, Chairman, KIM Software Solutions

In this blog, EASY Software UK partner, Ian Wimbush tells us about KIM Software Solutions, how they work with EASY Software UK, their public sector customers and the DM market in general.

My company, KIM Software Solutions, is a company completely dedicated to building software solutions for Police, Local Authority and Fire Service customers. We do this in two main ways: either by developing on-premise software packages or, increasingly, for some of our customers, as a Cloud delivered service based on the Microsoft Azure platform.

We’re a small, but very focused outfit: there are about a dozen of us doing this, a couple of sales people, but the majority of the team are very experienced software developers with an average of 20 years’ experience, who all have a very deep understanding of the vertical sectors we sell into it and what customers need.

How does Document Management (DM) fit into that picture?

Well, broadly speaking the application areas we cover are property, profiling – especially for our Police customers – and archiving. I have to say that there’s no specific DM application in there apart from archiving, which is the main reason we touch DM software.

Could you explain a bit more?

A Police Force is going to be handling a lot of information in the form of officer and witness statements and that kind of thing. So we offer a specific methodology and solution that incorporates DM to help with that task, the archiving task. Retrieval of the right information or document is easily the most important aspect of that, I’d say. That’s where our relationship with EASY comes in, of course, which is a very good one.

You’ve mentioned Cloud and it’s obviously very important to you, can you expand on why?

The reality is that due to the amount of investment they’ve made over the years, as well as concerns over security, very few Police customers are that interested in Cloud – it really does have to be an on-premise, servers-and-desktop solution there.

But for many of our other public sector customers – very markedly with the Fire Service and local government – we’re seeing a very definite interest in moving in this direction, especially into a ‘true’ Cloud environment such as you get with (Microsoft’s) Azure.

Ian is chair of Herts-headquartered KIM Software Solutions (http://www.kimsp.com/), a UK tech SME that markets a range of off-the-shelf applications specifically developed for the Criminal Justice Community, Local Authority and Public Sector organisations.