Oblix Inc has developed what it intends to be its flagship product in the area of services automation. The young Mountain View, California software company is set to announce its Corporate Services Automation package, which is designed to simplify the provision of corporate services. The first two components of the package will be the Oblix Corporate Service Center and the Oblix Corporate Directory. These are web-based applications that create, publish and maintain what Oblix likes to call a digital persona, or a profile containing any and all relevant information about employees, and automate the process of providing services for them. The CSA software allows organizations to provide and track employee resources and information by leveraging LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) services. The product is essentially the next generation of the company’s initial offering, the IntraPower Suite, which claimed high-profile customers that include 3Com Corp, Kinko’s Inc, Hitachi Computer Products Inc, Nokia Oy and Sun Microsystems Inc. The Corporate Service Center is billed as a one-stop interface for managing all salient information about each employee, with access available to anyone at the desktop level, reducing the cost of management by eliminating the need for some systems administrators and gatekeepers. Various security levels allow individual employees to access and change some information while keeping other data available only to management. The Corporate Directory works with the LDAP services to publish employee or departmental information on the corporate intranet. The software will be available later this month and will go for about $35 per user for both components. Oblix says that a typical deployment will bring in about $200,000 to $300,000 for the company, compared to $100,000 to $200,000 for the IntraPower Suite. The company said it is currently involved in its third round of funding, in which it hopes to come away with $10m – $12m. It began with seed money of about $800,000 in June of 1996 and bagged $3.6m in its second round of funding last October. The company has been growing steadily since then, from eight people to roughly 45 now. Revenue has grown from zero to between $3m and $3.5m this year and should hit about $10m next year, the company said.
