CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
6 January 2010
Company News
Informative Graphics Corporation Celebrates Twenty Years of Industry Firsts in January 2010
Informative Graphics Corporation (IGC), a leader in viewing, collaboration and redaction technology, celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year. Gary Heath, President and CEO, co-founded the company with Martin Davis in 1990 based on their idea for an easy-to-use viewer that supported multiple file formats. With $5,000 and two computers, they took their idea and launched IGC. Today, the software company boasts over four million users worldwide and is recognized for its history of innovation. IGC provides software solutions to thousands of organizations in the corporate, government, and professional services fields all over the world.
IGC is a versatile technology provider, having developed a wide range of products over the years, starting with the first multi-format CAD and document viewer back in 1991. It was the first viewer to handle the complexities of both vector- and raster-based content formatting. “Our original vision was to build a cool product that was easy to use and capable of viewing just about anything, and to try to make a living while doing it,” remarks Heath. “We definitely achieved those three goals pretty quickly and expanded our vision to include redaction, annotation, publishing, and content security.”
In 2001, IGC made the strategic decision to focus efforts on bringing quality viewing and collaboration to enterprise content. Since then, IGC has forged partnerships with top tier solution providers such as IBM®, EMC®, Open Text®, Microsoft®, and Clearwell® to integrate its technology into multiple platforms for a variety of practical uses. Its main products today are Brava!®, the all-in-one viewing, annotation, and redaction tool, and Redact-It® electronic redaction software, which ensures security and accuracy of data redaction.
Other product milestones in IGC history include:
- Through creative API usage and engineering, IGC created the first web-based viewer that enabled PDF annotations for an enterprise content management deployment, and also the first viewer to support concurrent annotations to enhance efficiency in business workflows.
- IGC developed a key annotation review concept called Changemarks® that permits step-by-step review of annotation/markup communications.
- Focused on solutions for content security, IGC developed Visual Rights® technology and the CSF (content sealed format) which can assign expiration dates to distributed documents.
- IGC was the first to provide pattern-based redaction that can be implemented as a template or a recorded script. IGC’s innovative, detailed logging technology gives companies a record of everything redacted, when, and by whom.
What’s next for IGC? Heath says, “We’ll keep innovating and improving business processes and security for our customers.”
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