January 2002 The IT Reporter

Well, despite the naysayers, (and there are plenty of them) Draven Enterprises in Orange Park is stepping into the big leagues. Draven garnered a great deal of media darling attention in early 2000 when the teen-led company was launched by Shaleen Shah. Shah and his partner in tech, Tony Sutphin, have launched a new division at Draven called Seventhman, which can be found on the Web at www.seventhman.com. Seventhman will be a sister to its already-established division Draven Web-Crafting, which has been running smoothly. Seventhman has three core offerings right now, but as tech goes, the sky is the limit. Shah and Sutphin have developed a Web-based software called NIKU, which features an e-mail management tool, a calendar management system and a task manager. The company developed NIKU with small business in mind. Because it’s Web-delivered, it prevents small companies from shucking out hundreds, and possibly thousands of dollars, on software. Plus, it can be accessed anywhere in the world using a standard Internet connection. And, for the security-minded professional you are, Seventhman uses SSL or Secure Socket Layering to ensure your e-mail is secure when accessing it from afar. Seventhman also offers two other rapid deployment solutions. One is EZ Merchant, which is used to help companies establish e-commerce on their Web site and the second product is simply called Intranet, whose name speaks for itself. Seventhman is trying to stay away from using the term Application Service Provider in marketing these services because the ASP learning curve is still huge. In fact, at least two companies that banked on making big bucks on ASP last year are no longer part of the Jacksonville tech landscape. (Do you remember Soma Systems and Insight Satellite?) Another reason to stay away from the ASP moniker is that a lot of people still confuse ASP with Microsoft’s popular solution Active Server Pages. I guess that’s because there are so many members of the Microsoft army here in Northeast Florida. Shah and Seventhman are also looking for commission-based sales agents to market the division’s services to Northeast Florida businesses. Another unique offering Shah has up his sleeve is around-the-clock software development utilizing a team of developers from his homeland of India.

- Eric Cravey
The IT Reporter