After all, everything is a about the passion.
For many years now, I have been wondering why record management – as one of the crucial cornerstones of compliance – is so complicated. Collaboration, document management, and records management have been my core topic for many years (hence, decades!) now, and I fully appreciate how complex and annoying on one side, and expensive for small and medium enterprises on another side, the whole topic is. I am totally au fait with attempts to bend Microsoft’s platform (SharePoint, and nowadays, Teams) to fit the EU compliance and records management laws. And more than that, I am aware that the vast majority of European small and medium enterprises are violating multiple compliance, records management, and privacy regulations – from the simple reason that fulfilling those regulations would include a colossal amount of software, hardware, internal human resources, and external consulting and implementation costs. After all, for many years I was one of those consultants.
One late night conversation with my friend and brother-in-arms Bernard – who has built a very successful financial software solutions company (INSA Investment Software AG), which operates globally from their HQ in Switzerland – led us to conclude that the compliance situation in that industry is nothing short of disastrous. Our passionate discussion ended with us coining a cunning plan: let’s make compliance and records management lovable. Sexy. First for the financial industry, and then for everyone else.
All that happened sometime during the crazy pandemic summer of 2020.

From that moment on, we have been relying on the brilliant Insa and Teams Consulting teams, to make records management sexy. We have been analyzing the pain that our customers feel with the existing solutions. We have been hearing about their needs and their secret wishes. We have been discussing – sometimes calmly, and sometimes not calmly – what needs to be done. We have been talking to the industry and legal experts in the EU and in Switzerland, to be certain that we’re not missing something. We have been (mis)using our existing customers as guinea pigs, to make sure that they are loving it and finding it sexy, and we are very thankful to them for it (you know who you are!). We have been working with amazing teams from daenet and Pialorsi Sistemi to assist us with the stuff for which we didn’t have our own resources, and we are very thankful for that.
Finally, last week, KORTO was born, as a joint effort of people in Zürich (Switzerland), Bingen am Rhein and Frankfurt am Main (Germany), Osijek (Croatia), Brescia (Italy), and Tallinn (Estonia). It was installed in the production to the first customer, and it feels very happy there. Purposely named by the famous dreamer sailor, Hugo Pratt’s legendary Corto Maltese, KORTO is a reliable anchor for customers’ records, helping them to achieve compliance in a seamless, non-intrusive, and lovable way. Its best friends are Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange, Google Workplace – but also with any other application that’s willing to sail together, and shake hands, with KORTO using its APIs.

It lives as an SaaS in Microsoft Azure, and it uses Microsoft’s latest AI technologies to help customers get to know their records. Moreover, as a cloud-based SaaS application, it will be affordable and available to everyone within just a few clicks. Really, to everyone.
KORTO is nice and friendly. While all of the KORTO operations have been backed up by an independent company, it is obvious from the start that it is an Insa Group company on one side, and a Nubelus company on the other. We made our living from being passionate, nice, and friendly, and we passed those traits down to KORTO.
As a nice and friendly software, KORTO loves having friends. Therefore, it will have a strong partner ecosystem to support those customers who don’t have the time or resources to implement it on their own.
We will be proudly presenting KORTO to the outer world at the European Collaboration Summit in Düsseldorf/Germany, 29 November – 1 December, 2021. Look for the big sails when you enter the expo hall and come and chat to the team of KORTO sailors. They will happily show you how the anchor works, and why KORTO will become your best friend, if you just let it.