Feature

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 17 No 06 - November/December 2009

One of the most interesting of this year's continuing raft of announcements of mergers and acquisitions was that of eCopy by Nuance. DM Editor Dave Tyler finds out more from Robert Weideman, Senior VP of Nuance's imaging division

David Tyler: The announcement that eCopy was to be acquired by Nuance was perhaps one the biggest surprises in an already dramatic year for the DM/ECM industry. Can you explain the rationale behind the acquisition, and how you see the two companies fitting together?

Robert Weideman: Nuance has long been a very strong provider of core technologies for OCR and PDF, as well as desktop applications such as OmniPage, which turns paper into editable documents, and PaperPort which is of course the leading solution for scanning and document management on the PC. In the last three years or so we've also seen huge success for our PDF Converter Professional product, which allows users to create PDFs from any PC application, annotate, highlight, fill out forms, and much more.

Around 75% of our revenue comes from desktop business sold into individuals and corporations. The remaining 25% comes from our OEM and MFP partnerships with the likes of Xerox, Ricoh, Brother and so on: we provide embedded OCR for Xerox, for example, and Canon has been a long-time licensee of our SDK.  We also provide many of them with desktop applications which are re-branded as 'their' MFP scanning desktop. So historically Nuance has a taken a 'private-label' approach to our MFP and OEM business, whereas eCopy has taken a traditional reseller approach.

Our rationale was clear: we were very keen to have a complete MFP scanning solution; we already had a very strong position in the desktop space of course.  At the same time eCopy has done a substantial amount of work in the MFP touch-screen and server environments, as well as their application connectors to over 100 existing enterprise applications. From a branding perspective, eCopy is the flagship brand for network/MFP scanning.

So from a partnership perspective, we provide Ricoh, for instance, with a desktop application that they call Personal Paperless Document Manager, while eCopy is already among their top selling partner applications. So this is going to allow us to become an even stronger partner for Ricoh and allow both of us to do more business.  Obviously similar situations exist with lots of other vendors!

Moving forward, we are completely committed to the eCopy product range: the only thing that might see some change is in the desktop, and that is unlikely to happen for a year or more. The opportunity here is for us to combine the two desktop offerings into one even stronger product. At the same time we will continue to support all the Nuance OEM products as well, and continue to invest in the eCopy MFP/server environment and application connectors, and keep growing all these successful product lines.

DT: To what extent is there an overlap between the Nuance and eCopy product ranges? How easy will it be to integrate, for example, the Nuance PaperPort and eCopy PaperWorks offerings?
RW: The thinking is this: we've been 'stretching' PaperPort from being primarily a consumer/corporate product into the MFP scanning space, and we wanted for some time to have a separate brand of our own in that space, so we think this presents a great opportunity. From an MFP scanning perspective, a year or two from now we will be bringing out an integrated product that blends the best of the two companies' technologies. There will be a clear distinction between our MFP products and our PDF products that people will be able to appreciate.

The eCopy MFP scanning desktop, PaperWorks, is currently sold in concert with the network scanning solution, and the channels are different from those of PDF Converter Professional, so we don't envisage any problems keeping those offerings separate in the marketplace. The eCopy range will continue to be sold through MFP partners and dealers as it is today, while the Nuance PDF product is sold through the two-tier retail distribution, Amazon, etc. as well as via our corporate reseller partners.

Product segmentation will therefore be clear, by virtue of the channels that we are selling through: PaperWorks, for example is never going to show up on Amazon.com. We - and our resellers - obviously wouldn't want to create that kind of channel conflict. I believe that PaperWorks gives us some brand segmentation, allowing us to service both markets while limiting potential channel conflicts.

DT: So, far from there being an issue of internal competition between the two companies' product ranges, you can actually see a potential situation where customers - particularly at a corporate/enterprise level - might have a need for eCopy and Nuance desktop products working 'side by side'?

RW: There would be a good reason for customers to have both products. The PDF Converter Professional product is - like Acrobat - not intended for network scanning, it doesn't have any connectivity with eCopy server, unlike PaperWorks. One of the big opportunities we see here is that, in our experience, less than ten percent of people who could be scanning via networked MFPs are actually doing it. So in many ways the biggest challenge we have now is not so much about the level of overlap between our product ranges, it's more about how to get more people scanning!

We believe that the addition of our core technologies in OCR, blending our expertise in ease of use with their robust server technologies, we can have a 'rising tide to float all boats' - we can get people to start to see scanning as a must-have business productivity solution on their MFP.  As yet we don't think that belief is as pervasive as it could - and should - be.

DT: Clearly this announcement positions Nuance very strongly for future growth. Will there be specific vertical markets that you will target now with the combined product offering?

RW: Nuance is already a billion dollar company, we have products sold into healthcare, banks, airlines - and we certainly believe we have the chance to be far more visible than eCopy has managed to be up to now. Now that we have a far more complete solution offering we feel ready to increase our visibility significantly. Our initial focus is likely to be on the healthcare market in the USA and the legal sector in Europe; but the overall potential across all sectors is enormous.

Conversations we're having with existing partners, and those we would like to expand relationships with, are going very well at present - the acquisition has been very well received within the vendor community. Our goal of course is to become the preferred supplier to all the MFP vendors, which is a natural continuation of eCopy's existing strategy. 
More info: www.nuance.com

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