Interviews

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 18 No 02 - April 2010

An increased emphasis on partnership deals has led to continued success in a difficult climate for OPEX. DM Editor Dave Tyler caught up with the company's Director of Operations for EMEA, Shaun Lee

Dave Tyler: The last time we met was when OPEX won the High Volume Scanner award for the AS3690i late last year. What has been happening since then?

Shaun Lee: One of our partners, Plumtree Group, has recently won a major contract with Trafford Healthcare NHS Trust, as part of which they will be supplying eight of our DS1225 devices: our first sale of this product which is new to the European market. They will then be marketing that solution offering across the NHS, which is a fantastic opportunity for us to get into this very specific vertical market. More of our business is being driven by this kind of partner coalition: in the last five years we have moved gradually away from the direct sales model and towards working with partners. There's a good reason for that: as a hardware manufacturer we offer the front-end of a specific process, but many of our customers - understandably - don't want to buy hardware and then also source appropriate software, manage integration etc. The advantage to us and to our end users is in having partners who can offer a truly end-to-end solution - a onestop shop. Over 50% of our business these days involves some kind of partner relationship.

DT: Does the partnership/channel approach mean that you are able to exploit new market sectors? SL: We have had a dedicated partner manager on board for a year now, whose responsibility is to establish relationships with partners in numerous verticals, while avoiding partner conflict. We're looking for partners across the whole of Europe: some vertical or country-specific, like Plumtree, while others will be much larger crossborder providers.

The traditional vertical for OPEX has always been finance: remittance processing and bill payments, whether for utilities companies, credit card issuers, etc., has been our staple customer base for twenty years. BT, for instance, still receives some 20,000 cheques every day from people paying their phone bills. But of course the use of cheques is diminishing significantly these days, especially in Europe, so we've had to go out and look for new market opportunities. It's that change that has driven our diversification from our traditional core products, which are mail opening and extraction technologies, and into document management and scanning. Our largest markets now are finance (still), along with general and medical insurance, and BPOs. We've seen a huge growth here in the UK among organisations offering to open and scan mail for people and send it to them electronically, and we're working right now on a number of opportunities, direct and through partners, in that sector. If we stayed still and relied on business just from remittance processing, we'd be out of business in two years - those companies are not really investing in that type of solution any more. Interestingly, a lot of our existing customers are also looking at diversifying, specifically into scanning and document management. Very often they already have the infrastructure in place to accommodate handling other companies' mail workloads. DT: How has the market for technologies like yours been affected by the recession - is that part of the reasoning behind the recent emphasis on indirect sales? SL: The increasingly partnership-led approach also means we have had to look at how we fund the business - we need to incentivise our partners, obviously, to the point where they're willing to invest their time and money. It's also meant looking closely at our service models. Historically a basic 7 till 3, Monday to Friday model has worked fine for our traditional customers, but new partners in different vertical have very different requirements. Quite often they may start later, for instance, but go on till 6 in the evening; so we've had to become more flexible in our approach. And that's fine by me: we're still doing very well as a company, even in the current difficult economic climate. In the UK the market is still a little flat, as you might imagine, but France and Germany are both showing signs of recovery much quicker than here. The advantage we've got is that, for a company that is willing to invest, our products will make them more efficient, will save them costs, allow them if they wish to reduce headcount. So while some companies out there aren't spending, for the ones who are we've got some really great products. The OPEX scanning offering is a unique one: it combines different departments and functions within a traditional business and it changes the process, and that is bringing us a lot of success.

We're investing a lot of money straight back into the business: our R&D efforts are very strong, and our software engineers are continuously working on new products. One of the great things for me in all the years I've been at OPEX is that the company really does invest in the future.

More info: www.opex.com

Interviews