Feature

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 17 No 04 - July/August 2009

“It requires a lot of research and investment to make the switch from a traditional Windows based client to a browser based client, while still delivering the ideal user experience.

 “It requires a lot of research and investment to make the switch from a traditional Windows based client to a browser based client, while still delivering the ideal user experience.  It can mean more or less re-programming a product's entire feature set from the ground up, so you can see why some competitors are resisting the pressure to make that move."

Jürgen Biffar, President of DocuWare, speaks to DM Editor David Tyler about how the company is continuing to thrive despite an increasingly difficult market, thanks to a focus on business benefits and a strong channel proposition

David Tyler: The last time we spoke DocuWare was making impressive in-roads in the UK market, having recorded some remarkable sales figures – has the business been able to weather the storm of the worldwide recession?
Jürgen Biffar: Absolutely - 2008 was Docuware's best year ever financially, so it was always going to be a challenge to replicate that success, especially in the current climate. Nevertheless this year we are still very much on a growth path, our worldwide sales are up by between 7 and 8 percent.  The strength of our partners has been a particular boon during the current economic situation: our resellers are not content to ‘sit back' and wait for things to improve, they are pro-actively seeking out business. 
But it's not just about going out and talking to more prospects: they also need to be capable of delivering genuine benefits to the customer.  That's nothing new in itself of course, but there has been a change that we've seen over the last nine to twelve months, in that we are talking much more about achieving cost savings and business efficiencies. Two years ago, our proposition would have been much more about introducing innovation, being more service oriented and the like.  This is not a change that is specific to DocuWare, we are seeing it throughout the DM space, and indeed across the whole IT solutions sector. 

DT: So does the basic proposition of a solution like DocuWare change in times of tightened purse-strings?
JB: It is about being able to customise your sales message so that it speaks to the business issues that are affecting them right now.  Take order processing as an example: if a user is looking to make savings by reducing the time it takes to complete that process by say 30 percent, and we can demonstrate a solution that requires an investment of only £20,000 or £30,000, this represents a way to keep your business running with less resource. It is our ability to show that fast potential ROI that is making us successful, even now.
The only way to do this is for us to perform some analysis of the customers' business cases and their (usually) paper-based processes.  Typically we uncover a number of inefficiencies in how most organisations work – documents still have a tendency to wait in physical in-baskets for a process, or to be moved to another location.  Pointing out the potential time savings of automating those processes is actually relatively easy to do, and most businesses are quite capable of identifying for themselves where their ‘burdens' are – they just don't always realise that there are technology solutions available that can help.
With mid-sized businesses particularly (which we would define as having between 20 and 500 employees), they tend not to have that strategic view of their processes, they are far more focused – rightly – on their core business.  They are so focused on keeping their primary operations up-and-running that they don't have the time and space to consider the more strategic view.

DT: What kind of partner-specific activities has DocuWare been involved in to support their continued success at promoting – and selling – your solutions?
JB: We introduced the Solution Finder tool (at www.findmydocumentsolution.com) in order to help our partners to make more sales, basically.  They can use the tool in conjunction with prospects or they can embed it into their own websites for users to experiment with.  Feedback so far is that what we have developed here is a really useful tool that helps to identify the areas where DocuWare can bring most benefits within all sorts of applications, as well as positioning DocuWare and its partners as trustworthy and authoritative.  It's proving to be a great marketing tool for the most pro-active among our resellers, as I mentioned earlier.  It's also versatile enough to be used for sales training by our own and reseller staff.
There are around 250 possible situations that can be investigated via the Solution Finder tool, including around 150 case studies and testimonials to illustrate the specific benefits achievable by DocuWare in all sorts of different business scenarios.  We then had to localise and translate different language versions of the tool, so it has been a lot of work – hence my belief that there is nothing else like it out there!

DT: What should we expect to see from DocuWare in terms of future product development?
JB: Our product focus has been very much on transferring more and more functionality from our Windows client to the web client offering we introduced last year.  The thinking behind this is to significantly reduce the admin effort required within end user companies, as well as to make users more independent in terms of the locations from which they can access DocuWare - and so far we have had some very good feedback indeed from the channel and from users.  One reason for this positive perception, I believe, is that the market can see that most of our competitors are not currently very active in this field.  It requires a lot of research and investment to make the switch from a traditional Windows based client to a browser based client, while still delivering the ideal user experience.  It can mean more or less re-programming a product's entire feature set from the ground up, so you can see why some competitors are resisting the pressure to make that move.
Larger users are more aware of the need for this kind of approach, simply by virtue of the fact that they appreciate the admin workload involved in having large numbers of Windows PCs in the field.  The Web Client offering is really an investment for the future as much as a competitive advantage right now – users only need install it once and it can be made available to any user.  I am quite certain that in five or ten years from now, this will be the standard approach to software deployment.
We are already seeing at least 50% of our new customers in the UK, for example, selecting the Web Client approach – it tends to be the logical default if the user requirement is largely about document retrieval and workflow, whereas applications which are focused on scanning and capture are more likely to still choose the Windows client offering at present.  For some time into the future we would see many of our customers using both product versions.
One simple example illustrates the effort we have put into getting this right: a small development from a user perspective, but a very difficult thing to do! Imagine you have a browser based document management client, you have retrieved a document and can see it on your screen, and now you want to email that document.  Typically, within a browser environment, this is practically impossible as the email client is usually installed locally.  But when we did find a solution and developed a feature that allows sending emails over a browser out of DocuWare, our more technically minded users were frankly amazed that we were able to make it work at all.  What's important about this is that it shows the direction that browser-based technologies are moving in: that we can introduce capabilities that previously would have been limited to the Windows client environment.

More info: www.docuware.com

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