Sneaking in Under the Radar

If you tried to tally the number of software companies that have come and gone since askSam Systems was born in 1985, you'd probably need something more powerful than the 256K IBM PC AT that was burning up desks back then. Before there was a Web, before there was Windows, askSam was the first unstructured-text database for PCs. DOS jockeys used it to create searchable databases out of unformatted news articles, legal documents, or recipes. Detectives catalogued case information, preachers indexed sermons—one comedian we know used it to search his jokes. The cult of users eventually grew to more than 300,000.

All this would be Computer Museum nostalgia if not for the fact that, with 17 employees in Perry, Florida—swampland an hour and a half southeast of Tallahassee—askSam Systems remains in business and is thriving. Not only that, it has just released an Internet-savvy upgrade to its database software, a new version five years in the making.

"Why are we still around? Part of it is just focusing on what you do," says askSam president Phil Schnyder (pictured above).

Schnyder says he recalls losing a big corporate sale—400 or 500 units—to Lotus Agenda in the late 1980s. "I though we had a good shot at winning that. We were much better suited to the job," he says. After the sales prospect chose Agenda, "I called the guy, and he said, 'Well, we decided to go with a larger company because we know they'll be around longer than you will." Lotus soon phased out Agenda because it wasn't a big enough product for the company.

The new version of askSam makes searchable databases out of text files, HTML and XML documents, e-mail messages, and other files. The company also has begun selling its database engine, so Web sites and other software can incorporate askSam technology into their infrastructure.

"We want to become to free-form databases what Oracle is to structured databases," Schnyder says boldly. "We can't just be 17 people in the swamp and make that happen, but we took the first step. You don't happen to have a spare couple of million dollars?"

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Ziff Davis Smart Business.