Q: Perhaps we could start with a brief introduction to your company.

A: Perceptive is an eCM company, operating with headquarters in Shawnee, Kansas.  Current revenues are approximately $65M and we have 500 employees worldwide.
Founded in 1988 Perceptive has a strategy of providing cost effective solutions that are easy to integrate and implement and are driven from their clients’ existing host applications. A major focus for Perceptive has been process transaction systems, which provide highly practical solutions by, wherever possible, reducing complexity for the user and technical team.   Perceptive is strong in Document Imaging, Document Management and workflow and while continuing to enhance and extend our core functionality we are in the process of building our own solutions in the areas of records retention and electronic Records Management, digital asset management and capture. Our goal is to provide a more complete eCM solution, powered by ImageNow, rather than glued together by acquisition or OEM arrangement.

Perceptive Software creates enterprise document management, imaging and workflow software for organizations in a broad range of industries worldwide. ImageNow®, our flagship product, offers instant, single-click access to digitized versions of paper and other electronic documents from any existing software application, giving workers a direct and effortless connection to the documents they need to complete their daily work.

A focus of Perceptive’s business has been in providing high volume transaction processing solutions that provide a practical design and functional system that shows a fast ROI.  We have recent examples of installations being implemented within 4 days.

Company Information:

• Began creating document imaging software in 1995
• Perceptive Software is a privately held “C” corporation
• Corporate headquarters in suburban Kansas City
• International office in Bracknell, UK
• 500+ employees
• More than 275 U.S. higher education customers use ImageNow, including five of the top 10 universities on the U.S. News and World Report America’s Best Colleges 2007 list

Customer base:

• Outside the U.S., ImageNow is used by higher education institutions such as the University of Cambridge and the University of  Cape Town
• More than 800 individual hospitals across the U.S. rely on ImageNow
• More than 100 financial services organizations around the globe use ImageNow
• ImageNow is at work in more than 70 insurance organizations around the world
• Entertainment customers range from Wimbledon to the WWE
• Retailers using ImageNow include Dick’s Sporting Goods, Harrods, WH Smith and the Home Shopping Network

Q: How has your sales department performed in the past few years?

A: Perceptive has an average sales growth of approximately 40% per annum for the past few years.  This has been mainly due to our ability to provide content enabling, vertical applications to our existing customers and to continually maintain our record of winning new accounts every year.  For example, we opened 160 new accounts last year and recently won a deal in the UK worth $1.2M.

Q: You have some impressive performance figures.  Many companies feel that this is an over populated technology sector with limited growth potential.  You seem to prove them wrong.  How have you achieved this level of success in this market?

A: We believe and think we have proven that there is tremendous potential in this sector much of which is still untapped. It comes down to a few simple elements. Probably the first of which is confidence.  Once established we have grown in confidence and ambition built upon our ability to provide a fast ROI for our customer.
Perceptive Software solutions offer a combination of benefits uncommon in today’s technology marketplace – non-programmatic integration, sophisticated functionality, user-friendly interfaces, quick implementation, flexible configuration and minimal service costs—delivering a surprisingly low total cost of ownership and a rapid return on investment.
We pride ourselves on being an engineering company rather than a services company, and our revenue mix reflects that commitment. Not much effort is required to implement and deploy ImageNow so we have a much lower professional services to license revenue ratio than the industry average.
Our professional services revenue are not high only 20% of our license sales revenue and demonstrate our ability to integrate quickly and efficiently. 

Q: In a wider sense, can you talk about the drivers that are at play, and then bring it back to your company and give us a sense of how you’ve been able to tap into these drivers?

A.The primary driver of our growth is that our solutions enable customers to gain business process efficiencies. ImageNow allows customers to capture, organize, manage and store unstructured data in a meaningful way—and it does so efficiently and cost-effectively. One thing that remains consistent among our customers is that they’re looking to gather up and make sense of large volumes of unstructured data, and then use that data in a meaningful way within business processes driven by their line of business applications. That need is universal and is independent of the need to collaborate on the creation of a document or to manage content on a website. So customers as diverse as Deutsche Bank, Harrod’s, UCLA, the University of Cape Town and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center all share the same functional problem. Some analysts call these types of solutions CEVAs or content-enabled vertical solutions. We’ve been providing this for more than a decade and we know the demand for this type of solution is intense.

Q: How would you characterize the current environment?

A.There is always, in any business cycle, demand for tools and technologies that deliver value. We see a limitless appetite for our type of technology effectively delivered to organizations. Our growth at this point seems to be limited only by our own capacity to keep up with market demand while making prudent decisions as managers of the business so that we can continue to ensure the great service and support our customers expect.

Q: How would you like to see your business develop over the coming 12 or 18 months? Are there any key initiatives or targets that you are gearing up for?

A: Our growth is actually accelerating. We expect to grow faster over the next 18 months than we have in the previous four years. We expect to continue to refine our product and to maintain our high customer satisfaction levels. Our growth has been 100% organic and we expect it to remain so.

Q: Are you able to quantify the market opportunities, the BPM market size and the slice of that market that is available for your solutions?

A: Our product is horizontal, applicable in many sectors and industries. We stay abreast of what analyst organizations say regarding the size of the global ECM market and we use that information to justify certain approaches. But for the immediate future, we see limitless opportunities for our value proposition. We don’t fret a lot about market share.

Q: Can you give us a quick sense of your financial strengths and firepower to move ahead as you would want to?
A: We’re well-positioned from a capital standpoint to grow organically at a rate exceeding 50% over the next 6 to 8 quarters. We have a strong balance sheet and strong profitability.

Q: Has it been a challenge for management to maintain the focus as you’ve grown and is the team there now to make sure you can execute on your objectives going forward?

A: The challenges of growth are not insignificant but we feel we have the team in place to take advantage of such strong market demand. We’re pleased with our management structure; our executive team has had no turnover in more than a decade.

Q: What is the mission and the vision that drives your company?
Mission Statement

A.To provide the highest level of service and value to customers in need of enterprise document management, imaging and workflow solutions, and to perpetuate a high value/cost benefit to those customers throughout the cycles of technical evolution.

Value Proposition
Perceptive Software provides functional, flexible, usable, scalable, extendable and dependable enterprise document management, imaging and workflow products that are easy to implement, easy to use, and easy to maintain, resulting in low ownership cost and rapid return on investment.

Q: What are the three or four best reasons for investors / customers (as appropriate) to look towards your company?

A: For customers, we offer a great value proposition—solutions that solve a business problem while being easy to implement, easy to use and easy to maintain, resulting in a rapid return on investment.