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Hyland life

Editorial Type: Interview     Date: 11-2013    Views: 4716   





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.
Bill Priemer: We're acquiring customers faster than the market, and growing the top line faster than the market - at the same time as introducing new functionality into the product at a faster pace than most others in the ECM space. Of course, there are all sorts of different ways that a company can describe its size: we are averaging between 600 and 700 new customers adopting OnBase solutions every year.

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?
BP: It's never the case that we simply sell a basic OnBase implementation and it stays the same: our solutions are almost always being modified, expanded, moved onto other departments. One of the ways that we contribute to and respond to that dynamic is by ensuring we release a major version of the software every year - which is more frequent than in maybe standard for the enterprise application space. In the last version (released mid-2013) there were twelve new modules - i.e. major chunks of new functionality - introduced. There were also 2500 individual enhancements to the software, most of which were driven by customer requests in some form.

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?
BP: Firstly there is a lot of emphasis on reporting within the OnBase system itself, in terms of numbers of different kinds of documents being ingested, monitoring workflows, i.e. reporting on what's going on with the system and its processes. All those reporting capabilities, and dashboarding of that reporting, we're building out natively now. Again, we've had the capability to do this for years, but now we're seeing greater adoption and user demand. And this comes back to the point I made earlier, because adoption drives user requests and enhancements: "Hey, this is great, but I'd like to see if it could do this…".

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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