Old-fashioned storage with high-tech twist.

• Position: Risk management - ArchivesOne of Waterbury, Connecticut

Document management is a big industry--$15 billion a year in sales, according to some estimates--and at $20 million, ArchivesOne of Waterbury, Conn., is a relatively small fish. But unlike some bigger competitors that are busily scanning everything in sight and converting that into electronic images, ArchivesOne (www.archivesone.com) is committed to the continued existence of paper--and has persuaded 3,000 customers to trust it with storing their records for safekeeping.

The 12-year-old company, with nine warehouse locations and 500,000 square feet of storage space in the Northeast and Midwest, says it wants to give businesses a traditional alternative with a high-tech edge. Air records cartons are bar-coded and tracked with Web-based software to facilitate retrieval, and the storage facilities are state-of-the-art, with 40-foot ceilings and fire-suppression technology.

President and founder A.J. Wasserstein said in an interview that the storage "represents a point on the information management perspective--it's one step before the grave, which is shredding. There is value in the data itself ... It's almost certainly not a medical or a business record. There's some stagnancy to it, but there is value in preserving information for audit, for analysis, for tax requirements; there is value in liability management, to the extent that companies engage in litigation.

"It can be hard to get a CFO or a legal executive to focus on managing such a small expense, and one not perceived to add value, but it is...