SmartDraw - Corporate Profile
SmartDraw at a Glance
- Leading provider of visual communication software to business, education, and government markets.
- Founded by its current CEO, Paul Stannard, in 1994 to take advantage of the Internet as a marketing and distribution channel for its software of the same name.
- Released the world's first visual processor in 2010.
- Each year more than three million people install and use SmartDraw.
- Recipient of the Delloite & Touche Fast 50 Award five years in a row
- Counts more than half of the Fortune 500 as customers
- Privately held and headquartered in San Diego, California.
Company Vision
The World's First Visual ProcessorTM
SmartDraw began its life in 1994 as graphics software, competing with Microsoft's Visio® and other similar products. Beginning in 2006, through intensive product research, the company noticed that:
- Mainstream business people were interested in creating visuals, not just the technically savvy experts that had dominated the field in the 1990s.
- These new users did not have the time or patience to manually arrange shapes on the page as graphics software requires. Graphics software was fundamentally too time consuming and difficult to use!
SmartDraw set out to invent a new kind of application that would make creating visuals as easy as creating written documents with a word processor: The visual processor.
Just as anyone can use a word processor to quickly create professional-looking written documents, anyone can use a visual processor to just as quickly create professional-looking visuals.
These critical automatic formatting features first found their way into SmartDraw in 2007, and were completed in 2010 with the release of SmartDraw VP, the world's first visual processorTM.
Historically, sales to individuals in business have accounted for the majority of revenues. Today, however, because SmartDraw can now be used by anyone in an organization, sales of licenses for 100 users or more is the fastest growing segment, increasing at 200% per year.
In addition to creating the world's first visual processorTM in 2010, SmartDraw also was one of the first companies to:
- Place ads on web sites (1995)
- Offer a downloadable trial version of its software (1995)
- Take orders on the web (1995)
- Deliver software electronically (1997)
- Use search engine optimization (SEO) (1998)
- Use email marketing (1998)
- Use paid search advertising (2000)
- Create and deploy a web analytics solution that measured real ROI (2000)
Today, SmartDraw is one of the most sophisticated digital marketing organizations in the world with more than 90,000 unique visitors to its web site and more than 12,000 installations of its trial software every day.
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