Feature

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 17 No 02 - March/April 2009

Hyland Software continues to buck the global trend towards consolidation and cutbacks, with average annual growth figures of 30% over the last 9 years.

DM Editor Dave Tyler catches up with Director of International Sales for Europe & Africa, Mark Greatorex

Dave Tyler: Hyland and the OnBase product range are beginning to gain ground in the UK market against competition from more established ECM vendors. How are you addressing the fact that one of the world's largest ECM brands is still a relative unknown here? Mark Greatorex: I joined Hyland in August 2008 with an objective of growing the UK's share of our business in relation to the business overall. It quickly became clear that we had to get over the issue that people in the UK don't really know who Hyland are: in the US we're very well known; in the Gartner magic quadrant we appear as the only 'above the line challenger'. Here though, we're still - as you said - a relatively unknown brand, and as a result revenue has not been reaching its full potential.

We've put in place some new partner relationships that are totally business-plan oriented, and are actively recruiting partners toward a total of around ten in the UK & Ireland.

Hyland UK has also been focusing directly on one particular sector, namely the insurance business. This is, of course, a sector which has been 'well-served' by ECM already: they're not new to the technology concepts, however for many of them it is perceived as a cumbersome, difficult to

change, and ultimately expensive, environment. We can offer a far more agile, effectively delivered and cost- effective solution. We've been working very closely with Gartner, Butler, Ovum and Datamonitor, as well as the likes of Fujitsu. This is already helping us to gain some strong references which of course help us with that all-important brand awareness.

DT: To what extent are you seeing changes in the way that ECM is being sold? Is it really becoming - as many vendors claim a sale to the business function rather than the IT department? MG: The primary drivers - compliance, governance, process efficiency against cost, have been there for a long time. But we tend not to talk to IT departments nearly as much nowadays, rather to the business units themselves. We have expertise inhouse that is able to communicate with the Finance Director, Marketing Director, Operations Director, etc. as appropriate, because at the end of the day we're about solving business pain. We have a good understanding of how to make a business more efficient and more effective.

I'm not sure that in many cases - certainly in smaller and medium organisations - the CIO is much more than a technology manager. In that mid-size market, where a

lot of our customers sit, they are certainly more technology- than information- focused. But that is definitely changing. The customers that we have a strong dialogue with are focusing on the 'I' in IT rather than the 'T'. In that situation it actually doesn't matter if we talk to the IT function or the business, because IT is representing the business. Whereas just a few years ago the IT approach was "how do we get this technology in and glue it together to make it support the business requirement?"

DT: Ultimately then, we may see the IT department as a service function - one that could be readily outsourced? MG: Certainly the other strong influence we are seeing is that the issue of Software as a Service or utility computing is starting to move up the agenda of our customers. Increasingly they are asking whether they actually need an IT department, or just the service that an IT department provides. I think we will see, if not a wholesale change, a definite migration towards the utility-based, SaaS model over the next ten years or so - and of course we at Hyland have a very strong ECM SaaS offering, so we are very well-placed to take advantage of that change.

More and more, our customers don't really care about the delivery model: the business has a specific business pain, and our technology can help them solve those problems, whether it's about the time it takes to process a claim, the difficulty of matching an invoice to an order, or whatever.

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