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.

Alternatives to Expensive and Time-Consuming Air Travel

Feb 23, 2010 - by Nicole Black

Let’s face it, these days, business air travel is a costly proposition—it’s expensive and takes up valuable time.

And, travel time is only increasing due to the recent attempted terror attack, as widely reported in the press.  For example, as explained in a recent Montreal Gazette article:

Massive lines, flight delays and cancellations greeted Canadian passengers traveling to the United States on Sunday as new security measures moved into a second day and another suspicious incident was reported on board a U.S. flight, increasing tensions.

Weather delays aren’t helping matters either, now that we’re in the midst of a long, cold winter, as detailed in this Chicago Sun Times article:

A messy winter storm — which could bring up to a foot of snow…— caused major headaches for travelers…prompting more than 500 flight cancellations at  both city airports.

One way businesses can avoid the time suck of costly air travel is to utilize innovative alternatives to face-to-face business meetings, such as video conferencing, screen sharing and online document sharing.

Data Room Performance Improvements at Firmex: An Overview

Feb 25, 2010 - by Marcel Meyer

Because data room performance is important to our clients, we recently released the first wave of our new software architecture to address the growing demands of our customers.

For the past few years, our customers have primarily used our data rooms for M&A deals which are usually made up of around 300 folders containing 5000 documents. However, as our clients are adopting electronic deal rooms for other uses, such as litigation and clinical studies, we decided to adapt to these new requirements. Some of these virtual data rooms might have over 80,000 folders containing more than 100,000 documents.

We’re excited to roll out our new architecture that supports sub second data retrieval, even on these large scale deals.  These improvements represent considerable time and money savings for our clients working with multiple small to large transactions. The litigation and life sciences verticals will greatly benefit from these data room improvements.