Nuance Acquires eCopy, Extending Document Imaging Reach From The Desktop To The Enterprise
By Jamie Bsales, Associate Editor, October 15, 2009
Earlier this month, Nuance Communications, Inc. announced that it had acquired eCopy, Inc., in an
all-stock deal valued at $54 million. The acquisition of eCopy from its former owners—a
consortium of Canon, venture-capital firm Ascent Venture Partners and private-equity player Landmark
Partners—makes Nuance an even larger player in the document imaging space, extending its reach
from desktop- and workgroup-level software all the way to enterprise and line-of-business solutions.
In the document solutions arena, Nuance is best known for its OmniPage OCR (optical character
recognition) line and its PaperPort personal and workgroup document management applications, as well as
associated business and consumer software such as PDF Converter. eCopy produces the leading network
scan capture and routing platform, eCopy ShareScan, which enables users to scan paper documents and
integrate them into more than 100 leading business applications, such as enterprise content management
(ECM) software, document management repositories, fax software, collaboration platforms and more.
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Robert Weideman, General
Manager and Senior Vice
President of the Nuance
Document Imaging Division
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“The companies’ combined solutions will create the largest dedicated team of MFP partner
sales, training and support resources in the industry, and gives us unrivaled resources for making
scanning valuable to businesses worldwide,” said Robert Weideman, general manager and senior vice
president of the Nuance Document Imaging Division.
According to Weideman, all of the products of both companies will survive, with no need to discontinue
overlapping offerings. “Nuance and eCopy are surprisingly complementary in terms of products and
our approach to the market,” he said. Weideman added that as the product lines become integrated,
server-based solutions will be based on the eCopy platform, while desktop programs—including
eCopy’s recent PaperWorks desktop document imaging utility—will migrate more toward
Nuance’s offerings.
Bill Brikiatis, eCopy’s director of corporate marketing, noted that both eCopy and Nuance
developers have experience in building business automation services, which will eventually help
ShareScan users. Automated business workflows, for example, are at the heart of Nuance’s
OmniPage, while Nuance’s Personalized Scanning Platform (PSP), offered under various names by MFP
makers such as Konica Minolta, Ricoh and Xerox, also addresses the business automation space. For its
part, earlier this year eCopy added several optional business automation services as add-ons to
ShareScan that run transparently as background processes and streamline repeatable processes. For
example, the eCopy Barcode Recognition service automates routine document scanning tasks such as
naming, batching, splitting, filing and indexing scanned documents based on barcodes contained in the
documents. Another, eCopy Image Enhancement, automatically produces a cleaner image of scanned
documents by dropping out background colors, removing lines or speckles, and so on.
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Bill Brikiatis, eCopy’s Director
of Corporate Marketing
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eCopy’s plan even before the acquisition was to roll out more such automation services for the
ShareScan platform, the goal being to bring production scanning capabilities typically found only in
software used with back-room production scanners to front-office MFP users. This enables office workers
who have no knowledge of image processing to complete these tasks automatically. “The Nuance and
eCopy solutions enable the distributed capture we see becoming prevalent, driven by the pervasive use
of MFPs,” said Weideman.
Another benefit of the Nuance/eCopy combination is the opportunity to continue the push to make
scanning commonplace in business. Weideman noted that scanning is still not as mainstream as printing
and other activities, and that the productivity and cost savings benefits are not yet universal.
According to Weideman, there is an opportunity for Nuance and eCopy to change that by filling in the
gaps left by disjointed solutions offerings to deliver universal benefit via MFP solutions.
In addition, the merger will mean expanded reach for Nuance’s desktop solutions, with Nuance PDF
Converter Professional, OmniPage and PaperPort desktop products eventually augmenting the solution
offerings for MFP OEMs and channel partners. “The merger is also helpful for the hardware OEM
partners of both companies, since they will now be dealing with a single vendor,” Weideman said.
That being said, Weideman does not see current eCopy ShareScan VARs and dealers offering Nuance’s
OmniPage, PaperPort and other products immediately. Those solutions have traditionally been sold
through typical online and bricks-and-mortar retail channels, as well as through MFP OEM’s
internal and independent dealer networks in the form of private-label solutions. (Ricoh’s
Personal Paperless Document Manager and Xerox’s Scan to PC Desktop, for example, are based on
Nuance’s PaperPort.) “For now we’ll focus on retaining our current pathways to market
until we get the integration in place,” said Weideman. “Then we’ll explore if it
makes sense to introduce other products to those channels.”
