It’s been a tough 12 months for the office document imaging industry as a whole, with plummeting print demand and slow sales of copier-based A3 MFPs. But there has been a silver lining: Anything to do with digital transformation (DX), migration to cloud computing, and empowering remote employees to accomplish business-critical workflows has boomed. DocuWare Corp. (a Ricoh company) found itself positioned at the intersection of all three. The company’s annual DocuWorld conference—held virtually this year—was the best attended yet, and the keynote addresses from co-presidents Michael Berger and Max Ertl showcased how the DocuWare family of content management and workflow products can help the customers, resellers, and partner developers in attendance thrive in a post-COVID workplace.
In his portion of the address, Ertl noted that DocuWare products helped clients address significant hurdles that sprang up due to the hurried shift to remote working, such as how to process invoices and other documents, access and collaborate on business content, as well as get forms signed. He explained that the company’s cloud platform (in particular) delivered attributes that were crucial for business continuity, such as 24/7 access from anywhere, security at every level, and fast implementation—all requiring minimal IT resources. End users, in turn, were able to access information, stay on top of their tasks, and be aware of who is working on what in a given business workflow.
From a business perspective, Ertl noted that DocuWare Corp. and its reseller partners fared well despite—and indeed, because of—the pandemic. The company added nearly 2,100 new customers in 2020 (an 11% increase over the prior year); not surprisingly, 75% of those new sign-ups were for DocuWare’s cloud product. The company also shared that 74% of DocuWare Cloud customers used the platform’s workflow features, 66% used its Outlook integration, almost 60% used the “intelligent indexing” abilities, and almost half used its forms-creation and forms-processing features. Notably, the total number of customer documents hosted by the company’s cloud platform surged almost 70% in the year to just under 314 million.
| The company shared the most-used features of the online platform in 2020 (the number below the circle indicates the percentage change from 2019). |
Berger’s keynote focused on the eight leading factors DocuWare sees as influencing businesses now and into the future—health, natural disasters, the global economy, political environments, changing demographics, environmental sustainability goals, data privacy, and competition/new business models—and how the DocuWare platform can speak to each of those. For example, Berger noted that the “anytime, anywhere” nature of DocuWare Cloud lets companies embrace the hybrid workstyles many organizations are adopting post-pandemic, as well as enabling customers to be ready to respond to the next health crisis. Disaster protection and recovery is built in, thanks to the redundancy afforded by DocuWare’s use of Microsoft’s global Azure platform. A company’s sustainability and “green” initiatives can be forwarded by using DocuWare to reduce reliance on paper documents.
Berger wrapped up the keynotes by pointing out to customers and partners that DocuWare Corp. has enjoyed 33 years of growth and stability, despite numerous economic downturns and other world events. And it seems COVID in particular has brought companies around to not just thinking about digital transformation, but actually acting on it.
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