The Client
Financial Advisory & Restructuring Provider.
The Challenge
Our client is one of Australia’s leading financial advisory and restructuring providers. With decades of experience and 60+ offices globally, their expertise extends from working with large banking syndicates to restructure major debt portfolios, to undertaking financial and technology investigations, to working with distressed companies to secure the best possible outcome.
A virtual data room is highly specialised platform used by stakeholders involved in Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) to manage documents associated with the sale of business assets while managing the associated digital rights, security and reporting.
At the time the client approached us, they were using one of the leading commercially available solutions to provide virtual data rooms for the transactions they were managing. However, they felt that this and other the available products were deficient in several key areas.
The client’s goals were to firstly address the above issues and provide a better solution for their own data room needs and secondly, offer this solution to any client who needed a virtual data room facility to manage their own transactions.
In consultation with Antares, our client secured an initial investment to build a prototype data room. The business case was simple: a platform with a payback period of several years, with the intention of building a new revenue stream and profit centre. Each internal use of the product would save the business thousands and with several data rooms opened per month there was potential to save hundreds of thousands annually.
The Solution
In 2014, Antares Solutions was engaged by this client to address these needs.
Partnering with the client, over the following 24 months, Antares developed a world class solution – a virtual data room designed to simplify the handling, sharing and distribution of secure documents associated with the sale of businesses.
The solution was built using a reliable enterprise-grade platform using SharePoint as the core technology. SharePoint offered out-of-the-box tools like document management, security and authentication that ultimately formed the foundations of the platform. The enterprise-grade nature of the SharePoint platform ensured that the client did not need to consider competing technologies.
With a view to creating a SaaS revenue service, significant attention was paid to using user-centered design.
The Azure cloud was an obvious hosting choice for the virtual data room, as it provided flexibility, combined with a more cost effective hosting solution than a private cloud.
Benefits
The virtual data room provided our client with a competitive solution for its own needs – saving significant ongoing costs. In addition, it enabled the client to launch a new revenue stream offering this solution as a service, combining easy auditing, cutting edge security, seamless accessibility and secure mobility irrespective of device.
During 2016, this solution was used to manage the sale of several high-profile businesses including an iconic electronic retailer and a renowned hospitality group.
Technology
- Antares’ Intranet Solution Accelerator
- SharePoint 2013
- Microsoft Azure
- Vitrium
- Kendo UI
