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The EASY way in

Editorial Type: Interview     Date: 07-2014    Views: 3818   







EASY Software UK's annual partner days are becoming something of a fixture for DM Magazine editor David Tyler. Here he reports from London's O2 Arena and speaks to UK Managing Director Howard Frear

It's official: London is running out of attractions. At least, EASY Software is struggling for a suitably quirky venue/activity for 2015's Partner Day. First it was the London Eye, then Rib boats on the Thames, and this year delegates (or at least those with a head for heights) got to scale the roof of the O2 Arena, enjoying remarkably clear views of the surrounding cityscape.

It was a suitably unique end to a day hosted by a unique firm, as EASY shared their recent successes and future visions with existing and potential partners. There were, explained UK MD Howard Frear, a number of activities that were contributing to their continued growth: events like CeBIT and EASYWorld, the company's innovative use of social media including the DM Collaborators blog (to which our Editor is a sometime contributor), and even the DM Awards, which Frear says are a measurable contributor to their lead generation: "The blog has been a particularly effective way of getting some of the necessary education out there about the whole marketplace; it's not about us promoting our technology or solutions."

PRODUCT PLACEMENT
The day began with a run-through of the core EASY products. EASY Enterprise Archive is the high volume content repository which in Frear's words "continues to underpin everything we do," alongside EASY Capture Plus (Frear again: "We see this as the future of capture for all our new implementations").

EASY Invoice meanwhile remains the only solution from the company that is volumetrically licensed (i.e. charging is per page processed as opposed to per invoice). Accounts Payable is still a huge market for EASY as is it for the whole ECM/DM sector, of course: an EASY survey revealed that some 52% of users when asked 'which department kick-started your investment in EASY solutions?' replied the Finance Department.

According to Frear over 30 billion invoices were processed in Europe in 2010 alone - and some 95% of those still involve some degree of manual data entry. EASY's figures suggest that manual processing of invoices can cost around 20x the cost of a similar automated process. Howard Frear describes EASY Invoice as: "A combination of various EASY modules, including capture, archive, workflow and repository. The workflow engine integrates with MS Visio, which can be a key selling point as most users are already familiar with how Visio works. This combination of modules creates a product that can improve cash flow and lead to early payment discounts - the benefits are clear."

One of the newest offerings at the Partner Day was EASY Documents 5, the workflow engine product. Server-side it is based on the same technology as V4 (Unicode, 64-bit), while on the client side there is what Frear describes as a 'very Windows 8-esque interface', built using HTML5 so as to be highly responsive and user-friendly - and tablet-compatible. The UI has been touch-enabled and uses the whole widescreen real estate available on modern devices, as well as introducing 'magic buttons' and popup windows for database lookups and similar functions. The interface itself is also highly customisable in terms of colour schemes, logos and other 'look and feel' enhancements that users might want to apply.

ARCHITECTING FOR THE FUTURE
In terms of the company itself, Frear was happy to say that EASY UK had enjoyed 'a storming year': "Last year we were 12% up on top-line revenue, and more than 50% up on bottom-line revenue - a great performance that fed into the German results, which again were up significantly. This reflects a growth phase for EASY UK over the last five years or so. We've been able to maintain our momentum even through senior management changes in the parent company.

"It's looking good in terms of performance, but it's not without its challenges. In the last couple of years one of our major challenges has been in ensuring we keep the right level of investment in new products. We've been consolidating a lot of products, including changes to our capture solution with the introduction of EASY Capture Plus. The product that we are now calling Capture Classic, we recognised was getting a little bit 'long in the tooth'. Capture Plus is different in that it isn't just about scanning: it encapsulates capture from multiple channels - print stream spool output, email output - still with all the barcode and data lift capabilities that you would expect, but with a much more modern architecture."

According to Howard Frear, the EASY UK team can sometimes end up with a better understanding of new products than their German colleagues, perhaps surprisingly: "You have to remember we're a delivery organisation as much as a support one, so we have to really understand the technology."



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