New chapter at San Jose's LibraryWorld

Business Profile

SUBSCRIBER CONTENT: Feb 21, 2010, 9:00pm PST Updated: Feb 25, 2010, 12:01am PST

Send this to a friend

CEO Norman Kline made the switch to providing cloud-based software for the libraries it supports and has seen its business soar since then.

THE BUSINESS: LibraryWorld Inc. provides cloud-based transaction services to various academic and public libraries. The company sets up automated circulation systems, catalog records, inventory tracking and other services including mobile device search and access for patrons.

CUSTOMERS: About 50 percent of LibraryWorld’s customers are K-12 school libraries, including some in France and Japan. Its customers include San Jose Unified School District and Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Ky. Its specialty library customers include the San Diego Zoological Society.

BEST BUSINESS DECISION: Moving from a traditional software model to cloud-based services 18 months ago. The company experimented with online services for about six years then made the switch last year. More than 2,000 libraries now use its online server while thousands of libraries continue to use its legacy, or traditional, software products. “We’re a small company and decided to focus our resources where it would be a growth area,” CEO Norman Kline said. “We decided supporting customers online was dramatically less expensive, and the types of things we provide a customer online we thought were far superior than with software.”

TOUGHEST BUSINESS DECISION: The company’s best decision was also its toughest, moving to a more profitable model. It was a risky decision to go from high margins to less revenue in the short term. That’s the key of cloud computing. LibraryWorld’s revenue for the entire company grew 13 percent from 2008 to 2009, and its cloud computing business grew 51 percent.

LONG-TERM GOAL: The goal is to support 10,000 libraries through the Web in three to four years and to launch new cloud-based vertical market services. Kline said that cloud computing will change typical business systems such as payroll.

  • Page 1
  • 2
|View All
— Interviewed by Susanna Kim

Comments

If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.

Inside Silicon Valley Business Journal

Digging Deeper Into Yahoo's Earnings

Most Popular

  • Slideshows
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Emailed
  • Mobile

Armando Garcia

Boys & Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley

Coe Heyward

The Buccola Group | Hasson Company Realtors

Michelle Harris

The BASIC Fund

T.J. Brackett

ABC Supply Co, Inc.

Darlene Hall

Hood & Strong LLP

Marie Oh Huber

James Campbell Company

Post a Job View All Jobs

© 2014 American City Business Journals. All rights reserved. Use of this Site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 12/23/13) and Privacy Policy (updated 12/23/13).

Your California Privacy Rights.

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of American City Business Journals.

Ad Choices.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2010/02/22/smallb4.html
www.bizjournals.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-42
88483
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:NW3STFS6SAYUFAYJQBR2QXL3P3FRUEME
<urn:uuid:d02f1668-cee7-4ecc-8223-8cf52e09217d>
2014-10-22T09:35:47Z
65.213.146.70
sha1:PR5CH6GWHNEF46N5FVIDETKIWL3ACIYD
<urn:uuid:567d27f9-0160-41ec-95be-fff09c9c7525>
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2010/02/22/smallb4.html
response
<urn:uuid:145cff7e-a1c1-4d9e-b8bd-065fadf1b48a>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-16-133-185.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-42
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for October 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf