When he strolls down memory lane, George Watson encounters a career highlight every few steps. Mr. Watson is what’s known on the street as a major player.

He’s seen it all and done it all. Nevertheless, he can’t ever remember being quite as buzzed about a project as he is about his current posting as senior decision-maker at WNS Emergent, one of Alberta’s top providers of collaborative document management and infrastructure solutions.

Mr. Watson, the company’s president/CEO, will tell you he hasn’t had this much fun in years.

“Working with this terrific team really gets my blood up, just like the old days,” laughed Mr. Watson, a former CEO of TransCanada Pipelines Ltd.

President/CEO George Watson (r) and Jack Ladick, VP sales & marketing, lead a talented team at WNS Emergent.

The terrific team includes COO Zuhair Shlah, CFO Alykhan Mamdani, VP Finance and Admin Jamie Jeffs and VP of Sales and Marketing Jack Ladick.

“I'm not doing this job for money,” said Mr. Watson. “I do this for fun. I’m with WNS Emergent because I saw a chance for us to build something wonderful here.”

WNS Emergent is a corporate spinoff from an acquisition/merger process that involved WNS Inc., Imaging Solutions Ltd., TLN Business Consulting Ltd., Emergent Technologies Ltd. and VerticalBuilder.com Inc., a company Mr. Watson co-founded. The company now has offices in Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto.

It’s a business that prides itself on shrewd management and technological expertise. That translates to an incomparable ability to help clients to connect, to communicate and to collaborate.

Most mid-sized companies can’t afford to carry a full IT component. And with a service-oriented team such as WNS Emergent just a phone call away (403.705.7500), there’s no reason why they should.

WNS Emergent answers the distress call with the savvy to tackle every challenge, while pledging to provide all the follow-up system support the client may require.

“What we did was put together a group of companies able to work within the document-management space . . . but with a slightly different slant to it,” Mr. Watson explained.

"We targeted the operating side of our clients’ business. Because the average Alberta company spends about 15 per cent of its operating budget on the management of documents.”

A public company (symbol: WNS) trading on the TSX Venture Exchange, WNS Emergent wasted no time in building a first-rate executive team. Corporate clients rapidly began knocking on the door.

Mr. Watson and Mr. Ladick cited some examples:

* A senior U.S. energy company needed help after expanding into a number of Canadian cities, immediately running into document-related difficulties.

“They found it embarrassing because they could never be sure what their accurate month-end numbers were, or which version of the data was correct,” recalled Mr. Watson. “After we equipped them with a version control solution, they were able to move the data around among all their managers and always be certain which version was most recent,” he said.

* WNS Emergent placed digitized signature cards online for one of the world’s largest banks, enabling the bank to check customer signatures from any point in the system. More recently, the company digitized key information pertaining to cheques and placed that online as well.

“So when you’re cashing a cheque in Halifax, a bank employee in China might be validating your signature – in real time,” explained Mr. Ladick.

* A large Alberta professional association realized its information-management needs were too large to handle without external help. So association reps contracted WNS Emergent to help lighten the load.

“We’ve taken over the entire management of their infrastructure," explained Mr. Ladick.

“Right down to installation of the desktops – managing services both locally and remotely, via web technology,” he continued.

Managing documents. Providing solutions on a one-to-one consultation basis. Helping corporations improve the accessibility of key information, normally protected behind the firewall, with security intact.

“It’s all about getting the information out from behind the firewall by means of web enablement," said Mr. Watson.

And WNS Emergent is not tied to any particular technology. The company maintains expertise in every major platform and includes FileNET, Documentum, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco and many others among its solution partners.

Corporate Canada has far too much paper on its hands – one more reason to call WNS Emergent at 403.705.7500 or at 780.423.3100 to talk document management.

As an investment opportunity, meanwhile, WNS Emergent stands second to none. The company’s well-seasoned management team engineered a whopping 20-per-cent increase in revenue from June through September of this year, while significantly slashing costs.

As Mr. Watson likes to say, “It’s great to see a plan come together.”