 | Goto-Silicon-Valley.com is the premier directory for Silicon Valley & San Francisco Bay Area business resources for startups and entrepreneurs. |
| Goto-Silicon-Valley.com is the premier directory for Silicon Valley & San Francisco Bay Area business resources for startups and entrepreneurs. |
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Dr. Georgios Papadopoulos didn't set out to build an international company when he launched Atypon Systems in the latter half of the 90s; he set out to build a profitable one. However, along the way, he managed to do both - based on his belief in the importance of working within your area of core competence. The idea is that you outsource everything that isn't core to the business to the best talent and resources you can find - wherever that may be. As a result, Atypon Systems - which helps publishers of scientific and scholarly information distribute their content over the internet - runs its business with a nucleus of highly trained employees in its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters. This group of largely PhDs can then command a broader network of expert partners and associates around the world. Papadopoulos, Atypon CEO, first came to the United States in 1985 to do his doctoral work at New York University. Following his post graduate studies, he headed to California to work for Informix. Greek mandatory military duty required Papadopoulos to return home in 1993. But the pull of Silicon Valley was strong, and upon completing his military obligation, Papadopoulos returned to California. In 1996, Papadopoulos formed Atypon. The company provides a suite of software solutions specifically for the publishing industry. By handling the technology aspects of publishing, Atypon allows its customers to focus on providing the content to their user communities. Today, Atypon maintains a leadership position in its industry by powering such premier scholarly and scientific online content sites as the Academic Press IDEAL Library, Blackwell Synergy, CrossRef and HighWire. Over 13 million researchers around the world carry out their research on these websites. Papadopoulos attributes the success of the company to an underlying mission to give its customers true control over their content and relationships with their customers, while providing them with the most advanced technology and operations support that frees them from having to become technology organizations. "Our reputation is that we deliver the most sophisticated and robust solutions for scholarly publishing," he said. "Unlike our competitors who do revenue sharing with customers, our business model is to charge a fixed fee for our software and services. We provide the solutions that enable our customers to manage and monetize their content." For the future, Papadopoulos said that Atypon's goal is to cover a wider range of technology solutions that publishers need as well as create more a ground-breaking solution for the researchers who need to integrate and mine information that comes to them from various sources. An example of this is a new product from Atypon, called ScienceLine, which is currently being beta tested by pharmaceutical industry giants such as Roche Pharmaceutical. ScienceLine allows the researchers to aggregate different information from both internal and external sources, uses taxonomies and clustering to structure it all and provides researchers with an interface to and mine this information rapidly as well as to collaborate with each other. The International Ties that BindThe road that led Atypon to international expansion is paved with long-standing friendships and invaluable business partners. One of the company's research and development facilities is uniquely based in Athens and headed by Nikos Markantonatos, a long-time friend of Papadopoulos. The two friends attended college together in Greece and also NYU. When Papadopoulos went to California to work for Informix, Markantonatos followed suite with a job at Sun Microsystems. However, unlike Papadopoulos who opted to return to California after his stint in the Greek navy, Markantonatos chose to stay in Athens for good after returning home to serve his time in the Greek air force. A few years after Atypon got off the ground, Papadopoulos encouraged his friend to get involved in the company, ultimately handing him responsibility for research and development activities with a small team of engineers. From an office in Athens, the group also supports European customers, so that the company can truly offer customer service around the clock. Unlike many European countries, Greece has not made a concerted effort to attract technology companies, according to Papadopoulos. There are no economic development agencies to provide foreign countries with assistance in setting up Greek operations and there is decidedly no tax break for foreign investment - in fact almost the opposite, Papadopoulos admits. However, Papadopoulos points out that Greece provides access to a large pool of computer science PhD's, who graduate from top universities in Crete and Patras as well as top-notch European and US universities and the benefit of a much lower salary scale - half as much as the rest of Europe. This makes hiring particularly attractive for an emerging company like Atypon. Papadopoulos ensures that the Athens and Santa Clara employees exchange know-how and technology perspectives. Besides frequent phone calls, annual visits to the Santa Clara office help the remote team feel part of the company and ease the integration of their advanced research projects into the company's systems. Athens is only one dot on the map where Atypon has a presence. The company now has an office in Prague handling software development. Atypon has just recently opened an office in San Diego with a focus on that hotbed of biotechnology research companies, and it works with consultants in London, Dublin and New York on sales, marketing, and strategic projects. The next office to open will probably be a sales and support office in Oxford, home to a vast array of scientific and scholarly Publishers. "To be a global business is a mindset," Papadopoulos
said. "We didn't seek out international expansion - international
expansion found us as we sought to provide our customers with the
best solutions and service possible. With a growing global customer
base, we will continue to hire talent and partner with companies
around the globe. Today it's Athens and Prague - tomorrow it may
be Asia. As long as we stay focused on our core business, our geographical
expansion is unlimited." "Across the Pond - A Transatlantic CEO's Perspective on Establishing A Global Business" is a monthly column that takes a look at an emerging technology company whose business needs require establishing operations in some other part of the world. Whether it's a Silicon Valley company setting up operations Europe, Asia or Latin America or an overseas company establishing a presence in Silicon Valley -- Barbara Kohn in SV and Jeffrey Peel in Northern Island -- look at the steps - and missteps - companies make when going global. More about Barbara & Jeff... |  |
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