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Document Imaging Report
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<p>March 18, 2016 4003 Wood Street ● Erie, PA 16509 ● PH (814) 866-2247 ● http://www.documentimagingreport.com Document Imaging Report Business Trends on Converting Paper Processes to Electronic Format One ISV’s loss is another’s gain in the case of Top Image Systems’(TIS) recently signed global reseller agreement with Xerox. TIS replaces capture software competitor Kofax as Xerox’s go-to partner for direct sales to large enterprises. Xerox will leverage TIS’ eFLOW platform to deliver “end-to-end automation solutions for industry- specific, content-driven processes.” Xerox Services (primarily consisting of the former ACS) is also considering utilizing eFLOW in some of its document outsourcing operations. “We started a little over two years ago looking for a global capture partner,” explained Dale Johnson, senior director, Global Workflow Automation, Large Enterprise Organizations (LEO) for Xerox. “We had a select few companies that we really looked at closely. We had them all come in and pitch their products over multiple meetings. It was basically an RFP scenario with vendors bidding to become our global alliance and strategic scanning partner. “The process took several months and the announced winner was Kofax. Unfortunately, for us, the timing was bad. We didn’t know Kofax was in conversations with Lexmark to be acquired. That came as a surprise, and when the deal was announced, it pretty much cut our relationship. It has become a scenario that if it benefits us to leverage Kofax, we’ll do it, but we’re not going to work with them as a strategic partner and do joint marketing. “The runner-up in the RFP scenario had been TIS. So, we basically picked up where we had left off before deciding on Kofax. We then proceeded to do all the things we do internally to vet a company before signing on TIS as a strategic partner.” In between Xerox’s selection of Kofax and its switch to TIS, TIS made several moves to bolster its North American and worldwide team. This included hiring a new CTO, a new president for its Americas operations, a new CMO, and a new director of alliances and channel for TIS Americas— Annie Schrenk. “Even though we had an existing (regional) relationship with Xerox, there was still a lot of work to be done to complete the global reseller agreement,” said Bob Fresneda, president, TIS Americas. “While working at ReadSoft, Annie had been key in developing our Microsoft relationship, so she had experience with large, global partners. “Working with a company the size of Xerox can take a lot of time and resources, and Annie was really a superstar—covering the work of many people to complete this contract and keep Xerox educated and excited about working with TIS.” According to Johnson, Xerox and TIS are currently in the time-to-market (TTM) phase of their relationship. “Xerox has a multi-phase TTM approach,” he explained. “Each phase has gate reviews, and before you can move from one gate to another, certain things have to be in place. We want to make sure that our marketing, training, and support is all where it needs to be before we launch.” Johnson explained that a partnership announcement is not the same as a launch. “However, that does not mean that we are Dale Johnson, senior director, Global Workflow Automation, LEO, Xerox TIS, Xerox Ramping up Partnership not already selling the TIS software,” he said. “We just haven’t standardized on everything the way we need to, so it’s still more of a one-off type approach than it will be following our official launch.” TIS has worked with Xerox to present its software at kick-off events held in Europe and Canada. “As a result of our work so far with Xerox, we are already chasing far more opportunities in the market than we were previously,” said Schrenk. “There is a lot of early training and pre-sales work going on right now, with a formal launch planned for later this year.” Xerox will initially market eFLOW to its 4,000 direct MPS (managed print services) customers around the world. “Our goal is to bring additional value to those relationships,” said Johnson. “We will then have a secondary thrust with our centralized production services (CPS) customers. These are customers for which we are managing large on-site reproduction efforts. We think there’s an opportunity to talk about implementing scan services with them.” Johnson acknowledged that TIS is also in discussions with Xerox Services. “There has been interest from several of our strategic business units (SBUs) within Services,” he said. “An SBU focuses on one or two business processes that are tied to customer relationships—like claims processing for the State of California, for example. In most cases, our SBUs utilize our own technology, but they are always looking for other ways to enhance the customer experience and improve margins. TIS has already been looked at to replace what is being used by certain SBUs. That’s happening now. What happens [after Xerox Services splits from the Document Technologies business] in 2017—I can’t speak to that.” Prior to the official launch, Johnson was reluctant to provide any details as to specific applications that eFLOW will be used to address. He did say Xerox is impressed with the software’s auto-classification capabilities. To date, TIS’ two most successful application areas have been invoice processing and the digital mailroom. “We work with a tool from TIBCO, called Nimbus, that is able to map our customers’ processes end-to-end,” said Johnson. “It shows us the length of time it takes to complete a process and the total cost. It calculates factors like the number of FTEs involved. It helps our customers understand their pain points and enables us to insert different variables. It’s a really smart tool, and it helps our solutions architects determine which pieces of our technology stack we should leverage in a given implementation. We have several different partnerships around scanning, with vendors like Nuance, YSoft, Hyland, and now TIS, that we can consider.” To support its expanded relationship with Xerox, TIS has brought on board additional pre-sales support and will be working closely with Xerox on marketing initiatives and lead generation. “We will be putting some skin in the game,” 2 Document Imaging Report March 18, 2016 Notice: No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission of RMG Enterprises, Inc., Erie, PA, USA. DIR is the leading executive report on managing documents for e-business. Areas we cover include: 1. Document Capture 2. Image Processing 3. Forms Processing/OCR/ICR 4. Enterprise Content Management 5. Records Management 6. Document Output 7. Storage DIR brings you the inside story behind the deals and decisions that affect your business. Vol. 26, No. 6 Editor: Ralph Gammon 4003 Wood Street Erie, PA 16509 PH (814) 866-2247 FX (412) 291-1352 ralphg@documentimagingreport.com DIR is published 23x per year, on the 1st & 3rd Fridays of the month, by: RMG Enterprises, Inc. 4003 Wood Street Erie, PA 16509 PH (814) 218-6017 http://www.documentimagingreport.com Copyright © 2016 by RMG Enterprises, Inc. Federal copyright law prohibits unauthorized reproduction by any means including photocopying or facsimile distribution of this copyrighted newsletter. Such copyright infringement is subject to fines of up to $25,000. Because subscriptions are our main source of income, newsletter publishers take copyright violations seriously. Some publishers have prosecuted and won enormous settlements for infringement. To encourage you to adhere to this law, we make multiple- copy subscriptions available at a substantially reduced price. Subscriptions: $597 (electronic) or $670 (paper) per year. Document Imaging Report Business Trends On Converting Paper Processes To Electronic Format March 18, 2016 Document Imaging Report 3 Notice: No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission of RMG Enterprises, Inc., Erie, PA, USA. noted Andrew Pery, TIS CMO. “We are really focused on working with Xerox’s Workflow Automation team, which is an overlay for their LEO group. “We are working closely with the Xerox marketing team to produce sales enablement tools. We plan to participate with Xerox in a number of joint events like Webinars and conferences. We are also training their solutions architects on how to implement and deliver eFLOW.” Johnson is confident in TIS’ ability to support Xerox. “Is TIS big enough to support the Xerox beast?” he asked. “There might be some challenges if they were not working with us like a true partner. We are providing resources in areas like professional services, and they are willing to work with us to bring our people up to speed. That’s how you work with a larger partner without driving up your operating expenses too much. “There are also some things we have asked TIS to fix, like their training methodology. Currently, a lot of their training is delivered face-to-face. I have impressed on them the importance of revamping that approach. It has to be remote and electronic. We need to have people taking classes remotely and taking tests periodically to validate their skill sets.” Johnson indicated that initially Xerox will roll out eFLOW in Western Europe and North America, but there are already discussions ongoing to expand beyond that. “We are looking to bring it to market in developing areas, as well as Asia,” he said. “Some of our internal partners in those geographies are very interested and approaching us aggressively about eFLOW.” Also, although the partnership currently only covers TIS’ eFLOW on-premises capture software, TIS’ SaaS and mobile offerings have been discussed. “Xerox wanted to see the roadmap for where we are going with the cloud,” said Fresneda. “They didn’t want to get stuck with something that could only be deployed on premises. Even if we’re not seeing it today, a lot of the market will eventually move to the cloud, and eFLOW has the capability to run on Azure, our cloud, or the Xerox cloud.” “We are looking to bring out some interesting SaaS offerings later this year,” said Johnson, who referred to last week’s ConnectKey announcement [see story on page1]. “We have looked at TIS mobile technology and have some ideas. We have own our mobile products and capabilities as well. We are trying to understand how they might be integrated and if that’s something we want to do.” An evolving go-to-market strategy The Xerox relationship is squarely in line with TIS’ revamped go-to-market strategy, which Pery detailed for us in September [see DIR 9/11/15]. “Working with strategic partners like Xerox is part of our strategy for our core capture business,” Pery told DIR. “Xerox can help us better extend our footprint into high value document process automation solutions—that because of our size, we wouldn’t have the capacity or scalability to deliver on our own.” Pery noted that TIS’ go-to-market strategy is two- pronged. “We will focus on selling our core platform through strategic partners like Xerox,” he said. “We will also sell financial process automation (FPA) solutions to the mid-market, primarily direct, at first at least, as we try and create some traction.” Toward this second goal, TIS recently announced its next-generation eFLOW AP application. “In the last year, we’ve experienced significant pressure on our core capture business,” noted Pery. “We’ve been seeing longer sales cycles and more unpredictability. So, our strategy has been to shift our focus to more out-of-the-box solutions in the FPA market. This should increase our volume of opportunities, shorten sales cycles, and increase predictability. “eFLOW remains our cash cow—but with increasing pressure on the core capture market, we thought we could build on our foundation (eFLOW currently supports processing of about 250 million invoices annually) and extend our platform to focus on some highly repeatable opportunities that we see in the mid-market for FPA. We’ve also taken into consideration businesses’ increasing adoption of the cloud and will be making some announcements soon that reflect this.” For more information: http://bit.ly/TISXerox Annie Schrenk, director of alliances and channel for TIS Americas </p>
