By Jamie Bsales, Associate Editor, December 14, 2009
In October, Nuance Communications, Inc. announced that it had acquired eCopy, Inc. from a consortium of owners (including Canon, venture-capital firm Ascent Venture Partners and private-equity player Landmark Partners) in an all-stock deal valued at $54 million. The purchase adds eCopy’s industry-leading network scan capture and routing platform, eCopy ShareScan, to Nuance’s portfolio of OCR, document imaging, document management and speech recognition products. To find out what the combination will mean for MFP OEMs and their channel partners, BLI spoke with Robert Weideman, general manager and senior vice president of the Nuance Document Imaging Division. Weideman and his team are planning to leverage the complementary products, technologies and channel strategies of the two companies to give MFP makers and dealers more robust product offerings, as well as to make scan capture easier for end users.
One-Stop Shop For The Hardware OEMs
Both Nuance and eCopy have had long-standing relationships with MFP OEMs. Nuance licenses its capture and OCR technology to the leading manufacturers, several of which sell it under private labels—Ricoh Personal Paperless Document Manager and Xerox Scan to PC Desktop Professional, for example. Many equipment makers also bundle Nuance’s OmniPage, PaperPort and PDF desktop applications with scanners and MFPs. eCopy, for its part, was the first third-party application available for Canon’s MEAP embedded platform and has since forged relationships with nearly all of the MFP players of note. In fact, eCopy’s ShareScan solution is supported either as an embedded application or via the company’s add-on ScanStation on more than 75 percent of Segment 2 through 6 MFP models currently offered in the U.S.
But Weideman noted that the strategies of the two companies differed when it came to their OEM relationships. “At Nuance, we were willing to do private-label products, while eCopy focused on maintaining the eCopy brand,” he said. “We believe in both paths. When there’s an opportunity to be a private-label supplier for OEMs that want general purpose and desktop solutions, we’ll do that. But OEMs like the eCopy brand for the high-end.”
Weideman is also excited about the complementary product mix Nunace and eCopy brought to the table. “With the combined offerings, we’re positioned to service the full spectrum of OEM needs,” he said. “OEMs can get core OCR and PDF technologies, scalable desktop and server products that can be sold under a private label, and the leading branded scan-capture solution—all from one vendor with a worldwide presence.”
More Full-Featured Product Offerings
In addition, since Nuance develops the OCR technology used in its products, Weideman feels the company is in a better position to offer more full-featured products to OEMs than other scan-capture vendors that have to license an OCR module from third-party suppliers such as ABBYY and IRIS. “We own the technology, so we can deliver the richest set of features to the OEMs,” he said.
For example, Nuance’s OCR technology can bring advanced functionality to a scan-capture solution, such as automatic redaction of sensitive information (ideal for the legal market) or automatic highlighting of particular phrases (ideal for education) as a document is scanned, rather than an operator having to perform redaction or highlighting manually as a separate step. “We see the progression of automation in the vertical markets at the scan-capture level,” Weideman explained. “Since we own the core technology, we can incorporate it into our products on our timeline; we are not at the mercy of the supplier.”
More interesting is the promise Nuance’s other in-house technologies hold for MFP development. “Scanning has certainly become more popular, but we feel it’s still in its early days,” said Weideman. “One barrier is that we need to make it easier. For the average person, the learning curve is still steep.”
Weideman thinks Nuance’s speech-recognition technology could help alleviate that. For example, instead of pushing a series of buttons on the MFP’s touch screen, a user could talk their way through an otherwise complex task. Nuance also owns predictive-text technology—the intelligent type-ahead feature used on popular mobile messaging devices that deducts the word or phrase a user is entering—that could be incorporated into MFP control panels. Instead of drilling down through a menu structure to find a desired entry for a color-scan setting, for example, a user could enter “c-o-l” and have all the color options automatically surface on a pick list on the screen.
Moreover, thanks to eCopy’s ScanStation offering, Nuance developers and engineers have a platform to use as a proof-of-concept to show to equipment OEMs. Noted Weideman: “Because we own the OCR, there’s more we can do. Because we own ScanStation, there’s more we can do. Because we own the recognition technologies, there’s more we can do.”
More Robust Support For The Channel
From the dealer and channel partner perspective, Weideman noted that the combined companies are poised to better service the sales and support needs of the channel. “Nuance complements eCopy’s strengths—a strong field sales and support organization and the best customer support team—with the robust operational and sales support of a 6,000-person company,” he said. Weideman noted that Nuance’s existing presence in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region will be especially beneficial to eCopy channel partners. “We will be able to provide in-country support for those OEMs and partners.”
Weideman also pointed out that Nuance’s existing relationships in several key vertical markets gives its channel partners a foot in the door when it comes to other offerings. For example, Nuance’s text-to-speech medical transcription platform is already in place in 4,000 hospitals—and the next hurdle for many of those hospitals is implementing a forms-capture solution to digitize medical records. “Nuance has relationships with the medical records executives at those hospitals and we’ll be able to help our channel partners with these important customers,” he noted.
This article was originally posted on Buyer’s Laboratory.
