Content Circles Expands Service Offering to Accelerate Subscriber Growth

PRLog (Press Release) - Jul 08, 2009 -
Menlo Park, CA  – Content Circles, Inc., a leading provider of distributed content management and collaboration solutions, today announced the availability of a free Personal Use license of Content Circles, the flagship solution that revolutionizes the way people collaborate and manage content across companies. Content Circles delivers a revolutionary new approach to both the technology and the business model for enabling distributed and mobile teams to collaboratively create, share, track and manage documents within and across companies and organizations on a worldwide basis.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and collaboration solutions have traditionally been expensive IT-intensive tools that require significant resources to install and support large, complex server-based software configurations. These legacy solutions require significant up-front investment and training, thus creating a high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for organizations adopting the technology. When implemented, these tools are often too cumbersome to meet the needs of today's highly distributed and mobile workgroups and project teams that require easy and secure access to the right documents at all times.

Driving Collaboration and ECM Adoption
Analysts in the ECM market have long identified price and complexity as two of the biggest impediments to content management gaining broad market appeal. The focus of Content Circles is on delivering powerful solutions that are easy to use, virally distributable, and priced for broad-based adoption.

Earlier in the year, Content Circles began offering the product at prices starting as low as $99.95 per-user per-year for enterprise users. The sub-$100 price point has been identified by industry analysts for many years as the level that could trigger rapid adoption. "In the first half of 2009, the company was focused on adding support for Enterprise Content Management Systems such as Microsoft SharePoint, Xerox DocuShare and Alfresco Enterprise," said Sri Chilukuri, Content Circles CEO. "Now that we have succeeded in this endeavor, we are ready to expand beyond the enterprise. Offering a free Personal Use License to Content Circles will give our prospects and customers a chance to experience the power of the solution and get a deeper understanding of the potential business, not-for-profit and education solutions that can add value to all sizes and structures of organizations."

Personal Use License of Content Circles – Always Free
How does the Personal License edition work? Any user can go to our website, www.contentcircles.com, register, download, and install the application. Once installed, the user can create one circle, invite as many members as necessary to that circle, and add 100 files of up to 25MB each to that circle. Unlike the current 30-day trial version, this personal use version is completely free and will not expire.

Membership in Other Users' Circles is Always Free
While offering a high-value, free Personal Use version is becoming a standard packaging option with many software products, Content Circles approach adopts ideas from other successful software pricing models in markets such as online meetings (WebEx) and document sharing (Adobe Acrobat) that have never been offered in the ECM market. These and other products allow free usage of and access to a broad array of content created through their networks and those of their customers, with content creation as a paid service. Content Circles' approach adds the free Personal Use license to give users comprehensive insight into the value of the application.

"Content Circles is a transformational product that democratizes content management," said Sri Chilukuri, CEO of Content Circles. "We have achieved our goal of making content management accessible and affordable for an entire category of users shut out of traditional ECM systems. We also expect to attract a significant number of ECM users that need a simpler, more cost effective approach to collaboration with distributed and mobile team members within as well as across companies and organizations. We believe that our unique combination of free access and limited free content creation will quickly drive paid license growth as customers uncover the true potential of the application."

The new free version of Content Circles is available immediately. For more information, please visit www.contentcircles.com/subscribe or call 650.847.1366.