It’s been quite a run for Nuance Communications’ Document Imaging Division over the past few years, as acquisitions of companies such as X-Solutions, eCopy and (most recently) Equitrac have put Nuance at the center of the lucrative scan-capture and print-management markets for MFP OEMs and their resellers. During its quarterly analyst briefing, the company announced new integrated scan and print MFP support services that should help its channel business partners.
With the eCopy and Equitrac acquisitions fully digested, Nuance notes that a 400-person worldwide support team is now in place to provide pre-sales technical and trial support, as well as post-sale installation and technical support, to Nuance MFP channel partners and equipment dealers. That team includes MFP solutions technical consultants in the field, plus available on-site installation specialists in the form of an Independent/Multi-Line Dealer Engagement Team and MFP Partner Field Engagement Team (servicing the direct-sales arms of Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Ricoh, Xerox and others). Should a partner’s customer require more specialized attention, such as a customized deployment, the opportunity can be escalated to Nuance’s MFP Solutions Analysts and MFP Pro Services personnel. There’s also a Tier-3 Advanced Product Support Team and, at the top of the pyramid, the Nuance Escalation and Product Request Teams.
On the product front, Nuance announced ongoing enhancements both major and minor. The company recently rolled out increased interoperability of ShareScan + Equitrac when used on same MFP, and when used on an eCopy ScanStation kiosk. One such enhancement is the new single-sign-on capability, which lets a user authenticate once at the MFP to access either ShareScan or Equitrac functions. There have also been improvements in using Equitrac’s audit/reporting capabilities to track scans made via eCopy ShareScan. And the company has integrated the OmniPage OCR engine into Equitrac Professional, which allows for the capture of data and conversion to Microsoft Word or Excel formats.
eCopy ShareScan v5 saw enhancements of its own, including “significant” MFP client speed for workflows; an offline OCR processing option; and MFP client enhancements for Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Ricoh and Xerox devices. As for Equitrac Express and Equitrac Office, this past quarter saw the debut of platform support for Lexmark and Samsung devices, multi-format HID card support, support for Mac OS X 10.7, the ability of users to release all pending print jobs at once to save time, integration with the Xerox Mobile Print Solution, and a new Color Quota display for the user dashboard
All of this activity helped the company in general, and the Document Imaging Division in particular, post record results for the its fiscal year 2011. Companywide, revenues reached a record $1.4 billion—up 16.6 percent compared to fiscal year 2010. The Document Imaging Divisions, sales were up 26 percent to $177.4 million. Those results were powered in large part by the Equitrac product line addition and launches of key products, including the aforementioned eCopy ShareScan v5, the new eCopy PDF Pro Office, the OmniPage 18 and PaperPort 14 updates, plus the roll-out of the company’s PaperPort Anywhere online service.