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Dennis Dimka is the Managing Director of Uptime Legal Systems. Located in Eden Prairie, MN, the company is the world’s leading provider of cloud services to the legal industry.
What's your background, and how did you get started in IT?
My background and passion is IT. Upon getting a degree in information technology, I spent the first part of my career as a network administrator and engineer. Over time, I found the business side of technology more interesting than I would have thought, and today I'm a technology executive and work on the business side of technology; the why we use technology, and less so the how.
Before I started Uptime, I worked for an ERP company that made software for the manufacturing industry. It was there that I learned a great deal about technology, and more importantly the value of customer service. They had customer service down to a science. The natural evolution for an IT professional is to move from the help desk to engineering or field type work which was my path at this company.
Following this experience, I moved to a logistics company as its network administrator, where I was in charge of the IT infrastructure; everything from servers, software, desktops, backups, maintenance, monitoring, etc. At the time, the company had a national managed services company coming in to help a little, and it was at that point that I realized there was a real market for outsourced IT. As the story often goes, I realized I could do this on my own, do it my way, and make more money doing it. With that, I started Uptime Systems.
Describe Uptime Legal Systems; its role, its position in the marketplace, and its point of difference.
We started out about 10 years ago, and for the first half of that time we were the quintessential managed services company, small and profitable. Then, about five years ago we decided to move to cloud computing, and then finally to where we are today, which is our specialty, cloud service for the legal industry. In fact, Uptime Legal Systems is the world's leading provider of cloud services to the legal industry. We are the number one provider, with cloud services to hundreds of law firms, and thousands of attorneys and support staff throughout the world, though mostly in North America.
What makes us unique is a number of things. First, we're 100 % committed to the legal market. We don't have any direct competitors. Many companies that we might consider competitors are those that do cloud services, and they may have a few law firms among their many verticals, making them really just cloud generalists. Second, we're the only cloud company that can provide a complete cloud-based customer lifecycle service, from hosting a law firm's case or practice management software to building accounting solutions, document management solutions, email and even service to their phone systems. In other words, everything that a law firm needs in their hierarchy of needs, we provide. Third, we have our own IP. It's something our nearest competitors don't do.
Let's talk more about IP. What do you see as the role of IP in the IT services industry?
I think the primary role of IP in an IT service provider's wheelhouse is to be the differentiator. Managed services and cloud services are becoming one and the same now, and so Red Ocean crowded and competitive, they're becoming commoditized. So to grow, to break out of this crowded market, and to grow profitably, you have to stand out, and to stand out you have to have something proprietary. And we think IP is the best way to do that.
But maybe more importantly, from a customer's perspective, I think it helps them select the right provider. Because whether a company plans to use this particular offering or not, it tells them we're committed to the market, and that their needs, and our offerings are in complete alignment.
What goes into developing the right IP?
The prerequisite to developing the right IP is to have a verticalization strategy. You have to have thrown down the gauntlet in a market, specialize in it, and own it. It's hard to know what to develop if you're an IT generalist; where do you develop and to what end? With verticalization everything comes into focus, and it defines the playing field in which to create IP that adds value to your clients differentiates your company, and gives you something unique to sell.
To do that you need to have an IP strategy. It doesn't mean that you need to start writing code and making your own software tomorrow, but it does mean you should have some long-term sense of what your IP would be. Part of that strategy ought to be to find a slice of the market within your vertical that is underserved, yet with enough of a critical mass of clients that can get on board with the offering, which can be used as a springboard to attract new customers.
Let's talk about your IP.
Our IP is called LegalWorks. Our main offering, and our crown jewel, is a service called Uptime Practice, and it's what we've become famous for in the legal community. It's essentially a hosting platform, a virtual server to host a law firm's everything—their legal applications, documents and email—and it allows them to get rid of their servers, their IT onsite support and host everything with us. As cool and as fast growing as this offering is, we knew we needed an IP strategy to continue our growth.
The one thing we kept getting asked by our clients and prospects was about document management or content management. As you imagine, most law firms are very document-centered. There's just a lot of document workflow processing going on, and law firms need a place to store and manage these documents. While there are many options in the market, those that were arguably the best were kind of big bears to buy and to implement. They required a lot of expertise, a lot of infrastructure and a lot of management overhead. Because cloud computing is about agility, ease of use, and minimal capital investment, we set out and developed LegalWorks, which is a cloud-based document, email and case management system only for law firms. The feedback we've gotten with LegalWorks is amazing.
You can visit Uptime Legal Systems at www.uptimesystems.net, or contact Dennis directly at dennis.dimka@uptimesystems.net.
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Dennis Dimka
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