News: Virtual Data Room Enhancements for Large Projects

Jan 21, 2010 - by Joel Lessem

At Firmex we are proud to announce significant enhancements on our virtual data room technology platform. The following is an extract of the press release made public today:

Firmex has released a new architecture that exponentially increases the speed in which users can review large volumes of documents.   “Since we do not charge for data or documents stored, our clients have increasingly been using Firmex for very large transactions. These transactions can run 10,000 to 100,000 document folders, each containing sets of documents”.

While this is not common on your average M&A transaction, if you’re restructuring asset-backed loan portfolios, running a multi-billion deal,  sharing clinical study findings, or reviewing litigation documents, sharing large volumes of documents is not uncommon” says Randy Rosenberg, Firmex CTO. With this highly efficient technology, Firmex can accommodate our increasing roster of large projects. “Our policy of unlimited use and cost certainty for our clients forces us to develop high-speed and efficient technology.  The combination of drag & drop functionality and the ability to move thousands of documents rapidly to and from the data room and the speed enhancements for large transactions saves our clients considerable time and money when managing transactions.  They are all aligned with our focus on speed and ease-of-use as key development objectives” says Rosenberg.

You can go here to see the full press release.

Why Is Unlimited Use of Virtual Data Rooms so Beneficial?

Feb 11, 2010 - by Joel Lessem

It has always puzzled me as to why virtual data room providers charge per data room or per page or total number of users.  How can any company running a deal know exactly how many pages of documents they will have? Or how many users are going to access the deal room? 

Therefore, a buyer is unable to predict the final cost of the VDR. If they misjudge the amount of due diligence documentations or users, they can get stuck with a hefty bill. This type of “multi-line item” quoting is not designed with the customer in mind.

The other item I never understood is why the limitation on the number of deal rooms?  It’s not uncommon to have multiple data rooms for a single project.  More so, it’s the ability to start getting “deal ready” and exchanging documents early on in the mandate. Unlimited use also broadens the scope of use.