History

The development of the Diligent Boardbooks^® product began in 2000 when AIG SunAmerica requested a solution to automate the management of its board meeting papers.

With this request, the company’s founders launched the Diligent Boardbooks concept. The SunAmerica Mutual Fund instruction was: “Please help us build a web-based system to streamline and centralize the delivery of board materials.” Their requirements were: “It must be totally secure. Most importantly, we need to keep it really simple and totally flexible.” After a working concept was produced for SunAmerica and it was used and tested, they agreed to license the first commercial version.

Testing and Establishing a Client Base: 2002 – 2006

By 2002, it was apparent that the end product was an extremely valuable licensing opportunity. With SunAmerica as one of our anchor clients, we spent a year selling Boardbooks to other major accounts in a market that had yet to deal with the implications of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Companies whose board materials were extensive and time consuming to produce were also early adopters.

From 2006 to late 2007, before undertaking an international rollout of a large licensing sales force, we tested several key growth assumptions relating to scaling the Boardbooks product.

Serving Clients Worldwide: 2007 – 2009

On December 12, 2007, we completed a public share offering of 24,000,000 shares of common stock in conjunction with a listing of our stock on the New Zealand Stock Exchange under the symbol DIL. During this period, we also redeveloped the Boardbooks product from the ground up. Diligent entered a period of significant growth as companies began to realize the potential of board portal solutions.

Launching on the iPad: 2010 – 2013

Diligent launched its Boardbooks iPad app in 2010, bringing ease of use and security to the tablet. Because Boardbooks already looks like a book and works like a book – or in the case of the iPad app, like an e-book – its intuitive user interface is ideally suited for reading devices. A number of releases have added new features to the app with more soon to come.

Today, many of the largest corporations in the world currently entrust their sensitive board materials to our tried, tested, secure and easy-to-use solution. We currently serve over 58,000 registered users worldwide.