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Current Filter: Document>>>>>> Hyland life Editorial Type: Interview Date: 11-2013 Views: 4716 Key Topics: Document Capture Mobile Business Intelligence ECM Key Companies: Hyland Software Key Products: OnBase Key Industries: Education Health | |||
| Hyland Software recently held its Europe and Africa Summit in London. DM Editor David Tyler took the opportunity to catch up with the company's President and CEO, Bill Priemer
David Tyler: Let's begin if we may with a general overview of how Hyland is doing as a business, and how it compares to the market in general. That figure has remained fairly steady over the years, but it's worth noting that from our point of view, those customer implementations are getting larger. Originally we were what you'd probably call a mid-market player, and we're still the dominant provider for instance in the US banking industry for document and imaging processing and management. But we've also moved quite aggressively into healthcare, public sector, and higher education - we're one of the market leaders now in colleges and universities. We know that we currently have around 9,500 active customers - we have something like a 98% maintenance renewal rate. That is an awfully high figure, and I'm glad to say it's been like that pretty much forever. There are a couple of things behind that. One is that we provide really good support. The first line of support is often provided by our partner network, so it's important to recognise that for most of our partners, OnBase is the primary thing they deal with either as a business, or as a business unit in the case of partners like Konica Minolta or HP. A product like OnBase is going to be very hard to sell, to implement and to support, if it's just one of many products that those people have to work with. So for our most successful partners - and we have a lot of them now - OnBase is "what they do". They might customise it, there might be specialised capture or output functionality, but we are the main thing they do. And that translates into really high quality customer implementations.
DT: What do you think differentiates the Hyland approach from the competition? We have a great methodology for customers, partners and internal Hyland employees to input change requests for our software. Then the development function will group similar requests together so we can see when multiple customers are asking about similar functionalities. Of the 1650 people in Hyland Software, around 450 are in the R&D function. Around 15% of our revenue goes back into R&D, which we believe is quite a bit higher than the average for the ECM industry.
DT: There seems to be a resurgence across some parts of the market in business intelligence/analytics as a product focus. Are your customers demanding that kind of functionality? In addition our customers are increasingly looking for guidance on the intelligence they can extract from our systems - that's quite new for us, as we try to decide how best to be more consultative in our approach. It is an opportunity for us to look at how to extract intelligence from an OnBase system so as to add value for certain types of organisation, certain types of industry.
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