Documens Boss

Business overview
 
1) Can we start with an introduction of yourself and an overview of your company
 
Neil Pitman - Introduction
I have over 25 years experience in the software industry in the UK as well as a two year spell in the mid-90s in Silicon Valley. The majority of that time has been spent in smaller companies, creating innovative products, firstly in the relational database market and, since 1997, in the document and content management marketplace.  
 
Most recently, between 2001 and 2005 at Randall Lyons I was CTO and part-owner and designed and created the Swordfish EDM system, which is widely used in the London insurance market. Randall Lyons was acquired by Capita in 2005. See http://www.capita-tds.co.uk/software.php for further information.
 
I have sat on the British Standards Institute document management committee to assist with implementing ISO 19005 (PDF/A) in the UK and, in 2007, I co-authored a BSI publication, “A Manager's Guide to the Long-term Preservation of Electronic Documents” http://shop.bsigroup.com/en/ProductDetail/?pid=000000000030175177
 
 
Aquaforest - Overview
Aquaforest was formed in 2001 with the goal of creating high performance PDF and OCR software products, using the Internet as the sole distribution channel. This was a part-time activity until the Capita acquisition, when I stood down as Director to concentrate full time on Aquaforest.
 
Aquaforest now has some 2,000 customers in over 50 countries.  The company is headquartered in Aylesbury, UK and has 5 UK staff and a Director of Strategic Markets Business Development in Atlanta, USA (Ken Guy, previously with ABBYY).
 
Aquaforest has been approved a Government grant to establish a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the University of Hertfordshire to further enhance the company’s OCR engine.
 
2) What are the primary products /services you offer and what is your key value proposition?
3) How do you position yourselves in the market?
 
 We provide high performance OCR and PDF software products. 

 We aim to provide the best price/performance in the market.
 
We are offering new flexible OCR license models to VARs frustrated by the “per page” and other unreasonably expensive models employed by the incumbents.  We are offering the best price/performance unlimited annual licenses to VARs
 
 
 
4) What business applications do you primarily address?
 
Our products are generally horizontal, although our best markets are Government, Legal (E-Discovery and Court Records), Medical (Patient Records) and Financial Services.
 
 
5) Who do you consider to be your major competitors?
 
For our OCR SDK we consider ABBYY and Accusoft Pegasus
 
For our “off the shelf products”, ABBYY, Adobe and Adlib
 
6) What geographies do you service?
 
World-Wide via Internet distribution. 
 
Market Dynamics

7) The Capture software space has seen consolidation and other challenges; how do you see this space evolving over the next several years?
 
We see increasing adoption of MFPs, along with associated software and a trend towards lower end capture products such as KnowledgeLake and other non-Sharepoint specific vendors, driving down price points, leaving Kofax in serious trouble unless they can make appropriate strategic acquisitions.
 
 
8) The ECM market is undergoing further consolidation, convergence and evolution with the impact of web 2.0, SaaS, social networking, virtualisation and other innovations and discontinuities in the market. What effect is all of this having on your business?
 
Our customers are exploiting virtualization in configuring servers to run our OCR products without any problems, but we have not had to make any product changes to support this.
 
9) The traditional licence/server software sales models are now increasingly being  challenged by other subscription based approaches. Is this something you are offering?
 
Yes, we are offering annual unlimited licenses to VARs for deployment of applications, including our SDK.
 
 
10) Has Microsoft’s Sharepoint had any impact on your business?
 
Yes, we have offered integration with our TIFF Server product for some time now, which allows for example VARs to use the product as a TIFF Image viewer, supporting annotations in Sharepoint-based invoice tracking solutions.
 
Sharepoint is a popular target for searchable PDF files generated by our Autobahn DX and TIFF Junction products.
 
We do plan tighter integration with Sharepoint in future product releases – for example allowing in-place OCRing of image-PDFs without the need to extract the file, process and replace.
 
11) How has your business fared during the recent economic downturn?
 
We continue to have growth.
 
12) What key market drivers are positively impacting your business?
 
1. The demand for lower price points on OCR and PDF software without compromise on quality.
 
2. The high end players (ABBYY / Nuance) sticking to their current pricing models.
 
3. Increasing power of multi-core/cpu machines enabling us to process up to 20,000 pages per hour.
 
New Opportunities

13) Is your company doing anything differently to increase sales and maintain customer loyalty?
 
We have recently added two team members, purely focussed on sales; one in the UK and one in the US.
 
14) Are you spending more or less on marketing this year than last? What has been the most effective marketing medium to increase sales?
 
A bit more now that we have two sales staff. Currently, Google Ad Words is the most effective medium for us.
 
15) What are your top three priorities for the next 12 months?
 
1. Establish our OCR SDK within the VAR community (the SDK itself is a new product although we have had OCR-based products).
 
2. Extend the OCR Engine functionality with our University partnership
 
3. Extend our products with further Sharepoint integration
 
 
16) Do you have the right team in place to achieve these objectives?
 
We will have, once we have the additional engineer who will be working with the University Professor on the OCR project. This is due in April.
 
17) What are the main challenges for you to overcome?
 
Making sure that we are smart enough to compete in the market, even though we have limited resources.
 
18) What has been the most important management lesson you have learned?
 
With a small, highly motivated team it is possible to compete effectively against much larger competitors.
 
19) Which new technologies, markets or geographies are you looking to expand into?
 
Increasing Sharepoint integration. Considering developing Capture solutions.
 
20) What is the mission and vision that drives your company?
 
To provide high performance software, using the internet and as a distribution channel and in doing so, change the economics of our markets.
 
 And on a more personal note...
 

•  Who do you most admire as a business leader and why?

 
Steve Jobs – for the original Apple turnaround. Any kind of turnaround is tough but in the tech industry, especially so.
 

• What are your favourite websites?

 
www.news.bbc.co.uk
 
www.metacritic.com
 
www.aquaforest.com
 
 

• What are your three favourite technology “toys”?

 
iPod Touch
Blackberry
Still waiting for the flexible paper-like eReader – but I think Plastic Logic will get there!
 

• If you were stranded on a deserted island, what are the 3 things you would want to have with you?

  
An iPhone
A large box of tools
A large crate of Newcastle Brown Ale
 
 
 Document Boss would like to thank Neil for his time and input.