PointClear Press Releases
Courtesy of the Mobile Register 2000 © All rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission
 Charging ahead
Xanté chief going full steam on new venture, PointClear By ANGIE DROBNIC - (Business Reporter)

Photographer by G.M. Andrews
Xanté Headquarters
"The market opportunity is tremendous for us. This is going to be bigger than Xanté." - Robert Ross Jr., CEO and president of Xanté, about new venture PointClear. Robert Ross Jr. came up with the idea for a new business while he was sitting in a car dealership on Beltline Highway about 18 months ago.

Listening to the paging system call employees to the front, Ross realized that employees who don't have their own computer terminals should still be able to benefit from e-mail. With the right software, employees could check their e-mail at one central terminal whenever they walked by.

He brought the idea to the engineers who work at Xanté Corp., where Ross is CEO and president, and they cranked out a test version of the software in 12 months. Over the past year, Ross has hired 50 people to promote and support PointClear Communications , an e-mail system designed for hospitals. Three weeks ago, PointClear installed its software at Springhill Memorial Hospital, its first client. Despite the rapid schedule, Ross freely admits he isn't sure how much money he will sink into the new venture. "Plans lock you into things," Ross, 38, said. "This is going to work." Ross said he is bankrolling PointClear using profits from Xanté, the laser-printer company he started with two of his own patents in 1989. "Your money is your lifeblood. We've protected that," he said of the company's finances. Xanté has been on something of a roll itself. Earlier this year, the company moved into new offices and opened a manufacturing facility in the Philippines. But Ross said he thinks PointClear could one day tower over its parent company, which had $35 million in sales last year: "The market opportunity is tremendous for us. This is going to be bigger than Xanté."

Photographer by G.M. Andrews
Robert Ross JR., CEO and
president of Xanté
Ross started Xanté at age 27, leaving an engineering job at then QMS Inc. to pursue a niche market for business laser printers. Ross had devised software that allowed desktop printers to print accurate plates and negatives for printing presses straight from a laser printer. The company began marketing its products to about 200,000 professional printers in the United States. "We try to tailor our products to people who use our product to make a living," Ross said. In the past 11 years, Xanté has covered the U.S. market and has expanded overseas, selling printers in 65 countries through a European sales office in Amsterdam and a manufacturing center that opened six months ago in Cebu, the Philippines.

Xanté's biggest international markets are Holland, Great Britain and Korea, Ross said, but the company also sells printers in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Egypt and Russia. At the company's new Mobile headquarters at 2800 Dauphin St., lights are on in the sales department from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. as sales representatives work shifts that coincide with business hours in domestic and overseas markets.

Photographer by G.M. Andrews
The company moved into the old Loyal American Life Insurance building on Dauphin Street in March after gutting and renovating the building. The company has built an additional 46,000-square-foot facility next door that will house its manufacturing operations, where 1,000 printers are shipped out each month. Xanté employs 250 people at its Mobile facilities. Ross said he tries to hire workers who already live in the area because they tend to stay with the company.

"When you hire people from out of town, they always want to go home to Mama eventually," he said. Ross said he intends to keep his newest venture local, naming it after the affluent, bayside community of Point Clear on the Eastern Shore to give the company a local flavor. Ross said he expects PointClear's e-mail software to be used in hospitals around the country.

The e-mail system, called PointClear Communications, is designed for the hospital setting where few workers have their own PC. Instead, users stop by centrally-located work stations. The monitor displays a table of cells, each marked with an employee's name and representing a mailbox. If a mail icon appears next to the employee's name, the person has mail. The cell's background color tells how important the e-mail is: white for normal, yellow for important and red for urgent. Ross envisions, for instance, a doctor using PointClear Communications to send a prescription or a change in medication to nursing staff, the pharmacy, the patient's own medical records and even patient billing records. To ensure patient privacy, all e-mail is heavily encrypted. The e-mail also is designed to document patient history: older messages can easily be attached to new messages in the form of a digest. PointClear Communications integrates audio and video software so that doctors and nurses can use photographs to document patients' progress as they are being treated.

Springhill Memorial Hospital Administrator Jeff St. Clair said the system has met expectations: "So far, so good. I, myself, find it easier to work with." Between 200 and 300 employees are using the system, he said, mostly those in the emergency room department and nursing units. If all goes as planned, however, the hospital intends to put all of its 1,000 employees on the system, St. Clair said. While health-care software might seem like a radically different market from laser printers, Ross insists the companies are not that far apart. "Ninety percent of the work we do on our printers is software," he said. Xanté is privately-held, but 73 investors have stakes in the company. And while Ross is the largest shareholder, he does not have controlling interest. But Ross said his investors are on board with PointClear. "They trust me," he said. Xanté investor Harry Moreland of Orange Beach agreed that he does, and said "the majority of the investors do. There are a few outspoken people, but Robert is a brilliant young man, and I have complete faith in him."

Demonstrating the software at Xanté headquarters a few weeks ago, Ross said the thrill of starting a new venture has reinvigorated his enthusiasm for his work. "I'd like to start a new business every couple of years," he said. "It brings me back to where I was 10 years ago."