Moving the Records: How Colligo Found the Future in the Cloud

By the time Tim Brady stepped into the CEO role at Colligo, the world was already shifting. The cloud had become the beating heart of enterprise operations—Salesforce had brought CRM to the cloud, Workday had done the same for HR, and ERPs were well on their way. But business records? The single most trusted assets of an organization—contracts, compliance documents, key correspondence—were still shackled to legacy systems, buried in on-premise servers, or worse, lost in a never-ending scroll of inbox searches.

Brady saw it for what it was: a gap, a hesitation, an industry still waiting to take the leap. So, in 2019, he made a bet. He acquired Colligo, a Canadian company with a 20-year history of helping enterprises manage content—historically on-premise. He had one vision: take it to the cloud and make it seamless for Microsoft 365 users to manage emails and attachments.

At first, the industry wasn’t quite ready.

“It was the ‘build it and they will come’ problem,” Brady recalls. “Except, they weren’t coming at the time—not in droves, anyway. We were early with our Cloud solution… The pandemic changed everything.”

Suddenly, remote work wasn’t an experiment. It was the only way. Businesses needed collaboration, access, and security—now. That hesitation Brady had seen? It evaporated. The move to the cloud became inevitable, and Colligo, already several years into its transformation, was ready.

A Company Rebuilt from the Ground Up

Colligo had a pedigree—4,000 clients over two decades. But like many companies built in a different era, it needed reinvention. Brady didn’t just add a cloud-based option; he changed the company's DNA.

“We weren’t just dropping an on-prem solution into the cloud. We had to rethink how people interact with their documents, how they file and retrieve them,” Brady explains. “We introduced auto-file and bulk-file capabilities, so we’re not just moving data—we’re organizing it at scale, in a way that works for enterprises.”

Colligo wasn’t just a better filing system—it was a strategic shift in how companies thought about their knowledge assets. For industries dealing with compliance-heavy regulations—finance, legal, utilities, government—Colligo offered something they never had before: simplicity in compliance, with the security of Microsoft 365.

“The biggest challenge,” Brady admits, “wasn’t building the tech. It was changing the perception of what we do. People knew Colligo for one thing. Now, we had to get them to see it as something else.”

That messaging problem isn’t unique to Colligo—it’s the crux of any transformation. In enterprise software, you’re either a known entity or a disruptor. Brady had to navigate both.

The Unseen Challenge of Enterprise Adoption

The most exciting stories in tech often come from underdog startups launching something bold and unexpected. But what happens when you have to convince enterprises—giants, sometimes reluctant ones—that they need something they don’t realize is broken?

“Replacing an existing tool is easy. People already know they need it, they just want a better version,” Brady says. “But what happens when there’s no solution in place? You have to get leadership aligned. You have to make them realize, ‘This isn’t just an IT problem, this is a business problem.’ That’s the hard part.”

Colligo’s most significant opportunity wasn’t stealing market share from competitors—it was tapping into the vast white space of companies that had never implemented a proper email and records management system. The numbers were staggering. By Brady’s estimation, Colligo’s market penetration sits at 0.5%. That’s not a discouraging figure—it’s an open frontier.

“What good are contracts, NDAs, or critical business records if you can’t even find them when you need them?” Brady asks. “Most businesses don’t have a solution for this yet. They don’t know they need one until it becomes a problem.”

What’s Next for Colligo?

Despite his success, Brady remains pragmatic. “Scaling isn’t just about hiring more people. It’s about efficiency. We’ve always been mindful of profitability and ensuring data backs each hire.”

He’s not chasing growth for the sake of growth. He’s watching the market shift. The rise of AI and large language models could have been seen as a threat—after all, wouldn’t these models just organize everything for us? But Brady isn’t worried. If anything, he sees it as an accelerant.

“LLMs need data to work. They need structured, centralized content. If you don’t have your documents stored properly, AI isn’t going to fix that magically,” he says. “Companies are realizing that they need to get their house in order before they can leverage AI. And that’s where we come in.”

Microsoft certainly thinks so, having selected Colligo as one of only a few Microsoft Preferred Content AI Partners. Colligo is strengthening that relationship with Microsoft, helping enterprises prepare for a future where AI-driven document management isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity.

For now, though, the mission remains the same: making content accessible, searchable, and secure.

“In five years, I don’t think we’ll be talking about whether or not a company has a modern records management system,” Brady says. “We’ll be talking about how well they’re using it.”

And Colligo intends to be at the center of that conversation.