Nuance Acquires NSi; AutoStore Joins eCopy ShareScan in Company’s Capture Portfolio

Jul 23, 2014 12:22:28 PM

By Jamie Bsales

Software and solutions developer Nuance Communications—best known to the document imaging channel for its Equitrac, OmniPage and eCopy ShareScan and offerings—has quietly beefed up its already-strong position in the MFP capture/workflow space by acquiring rival Notable Solutions, Inc. (NSi) in an as-yet unannounced deal. The purchase brings NSi’s AutoStore capture/routing product into Nuance’s fast-growing Document Imaging Division, where it will augment the eCopy ShareScan family of products Nuance acquired a few years back.

“We view capture as growing in importance, and are always looking for ways to grow the business and add technology to our portfolio,” said a Nuance spokesperson. The plan, he noted, was to have both products co-exist in the portfolio as standalone products.

While there is much overlap in general functionality between the two products—each allows a user to capture paper documents at the MFP or electronic documents from other sources, process them according to set rules, and deliver the resulting output to a final destination—the products do serve different, but complementary markets. eCopy ShareScan’s strength, noted Nuance, is in workgroup ad-hoc capture, where a user needs to digitize a document and deliver it to a destination. AutoStore’s strength is in tying the captured data into a workflow process. Similarly, NSi’s Output Manager product, a result of its purchase of the enterprise output management business from Barr Systems in early 2013, shares some traits in common with Nuance’s Equitrac cost accounting/recovery line (acquired by Nuance in 2011) but has more of a focus on enterprise-level and production output management and workflow. The purchase also brings NSi Mobile, a secure mobile print platform, into Nuance’s fold, a capability it currently partners with PrinterOn to offer.

We’ll report more details—specifically, what the deal means to current resellers and customers of the companies’ respective products as we get them. In the meantime, be sure to check out BLI’s coverage of eCopy ShareScan and NSi AutoStore for in-depth details on both products.