Davacord president/CEO Jon McNaught recently told the story of his company's start.

The voice and data logging firm incorporated in 2001 and went to market with a voice logging system.

"We staffed up our engineering side and had a business plan to spend about two years of trying to take this logger, which was relatively plain in its application, and build a full recording platform," he said.

Since then, the company has added what he described as a "very robust" quality assurance evaluation package and has given the logger a Web-based interface and a graphical user interface.

"A lot of businesses are understanding that it's incredibly important for them to capture communication, data, telephony and computer data."

"We've added screen and data capture from the PC in addition to just purely logging the voice," he said. "Our product can now compete in the recording platform space -- call center/contact center on up -- really with any other product that's out there."

And what did this approach produce?

Vertical markets served by his firm include insurance, financial services, healthcare and telecom.

The growth has included $1.6 million in total sales in 2002, followed by $2.6 million in 2003, $4 million last year and about $6 million projected this year

"[We] focused solely on engineering in the first couple of years," he said. "[The] product is so much easier to sell today than it was three or four years ago since it's more robust."

The impressive growth preceded OnviSource's purchase of Davacord in a deal that was announced in August. OnviSource is the parent company of CadCom Telesystems, Business Solutions and Axius Portals.

An increased focus on sales and marketing helped push the numbers upward. The number of regional sales managers has doubled to the current total of four.

"A lot of businesses are understanding that it's incredibly important for them to capture communication, data, telephony and computer data," he said.

He also said growth opportunities in the call center and contact center market exist in the small and medium-sized applications.

"It would be great if the hardware manufacturers could come up with some standard protocols and have some level of agreement with respect to how VoIP is going to be handled."

"Our goal is to have this very robust recording platform … available for a market that has historically not had that kind of functionality and feature sets available at that price," he said. "We sell into the 250-, 350-, 400-, 500-seat call and contact centers or 200-to 500-line businesses ... and we can do it at a very cost-effective price.

"We think that there is quite a void between the enterprise-level space and the … entry-level up to medium customers. They've either got to shell out the bucks … or historically they've had to be willing to give up a lot of feature sets to fit their budget. We want to position ourselves there in the middle and say, 'Hey, look, we'll give you 95 percent of the functionality of the enterprise players at a fraction of the cost.' "

He discussed a client, a manufacturer with 1,600 to 1,800 employees, that uses a "massive phone and data system" within the company.

"They have never been a target customer of the recording platform," he said. "They just don't fit the target market. We have been able to assist them dramatically with their customer service, customer relations [and] product issues."

McNaught said his firm is running a 96-channel recording system, both voice and data, in this client company.Growth opportunities in the call center and contact center market exist in the small and medium-sized applications.

"We can hook this up in a couple of hours. It works throughout your phone system and it's on your central file server and we can train your people in less than a day. That is an example of how we think our product is probably different than a lot of others on the market."

He was also asked about how things should be done differently in the industry.

"It would be great if the hardware manufacturers could come up with some standard protocols and have some level of agreement with respect to how VoIP is going to be handled," said McNaught, whose firm has a VoIP solution in beta form. "I don't think you're going to see that because … there's going to be a competitive arena for the next five to 10 years until the three or four or five successful competitors come out with the more appropriate protocols."