Nuance Announces PDF Converter Enterprise 7

Yesterday, Nuance announced the new release of its award-winning desktop PDF software, Nuance PDF Converter Enterprise 7.  Nuance is continuing to improve their position in the office solution space with this new product which works seamlessly with Nuance eCopy solutions, which Nuance acquired in 2009.  With a variety of connectors for eCopy ShareScan and PaperWorks to build off of, PDF Converter Enterprise 7 promises it will enable users with the full functional benefits of PDF and connectivity into DMS.

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HP Extends Its MES Offerings

On April 20, HP made a few new announcements to help strengthen its Managed Enterprise Services (MES) offering to its customers. HP has been offering Managed Print services through its direct organization for almost 4 years now. HP executives say that the company currently has approximately 2,500 customers and is managing approximately 18.5 billion pages under HP MPS programs. Back in September of 2009, HP formally named its program Managed Enterprise Services, in which executives reinforced the company’s Optimize, Manage, and Improve Workflow strategies with new solutions and an extended alliance with longtime partner Canon. This alliance was reinforced with an announcement made last week between HP, Canon, and Fedex Office. This new offering will bring about 12,000 devices into 1,800 locations where customers will be able to utilize these print and output solutions in a near site location. Read more »

European debt resulting in different speeds of economic recovery

Wherever I go at the moment I hear cautious optimism regarding the European economy and the prospects for business in 2010. Nevertheless there seems to be something troubling people, a sense of unease despite the positive sentiments. A couple of weeks ago someone went as far as suggesting they were seeing a multi-speed recovery in Europe; some markets picking up - others remaining severely challenged.

Today, I thought I’d take the bull by the horns, go one step further and openly talk about the enormous elephant in the room – DEBT.

OK, so I’ve said it – what now? Read more »

Open Text Analyst Event

I had the opportunity to attend the Open Text Analyst Event in Boston on January 13th. This annual event provides Open Text the opportunity to share their current marketing and product strategy plans.  The event format seemed to follow others I have attended as well as past Open Text events (there were no show stoppers or game changing announcements this time around). Open Text provided information to the hungry analysts by way of plenty of powerpoint to chew on in the morning session.  The sound of laptops and tablets tapping away (I chose old school pen and composition notebook) was the background hum to each presenter.  The executive team, some of which are relatively new to Open Text, each presented their area of expertise and built upon the last digging slightly deeper as we went along . In an effort to change the tone (and maybe to push back the post luncheon yawns),  the afternoon provided a “speed-dating” (we all joked about it) atmosphere, sitting with select members of the executive team for short bursts of time.

If you don’t know who Open Text is, they are a multi-national company that manages content for hundreds of brands (BMW, Sony, Citibank, Pfizer and Coca Cola just to name a few) and states more than 100 million users in over 50,000 deployments worldwide. So if you don’t know Open Text, you certainly know the companys whose content they support.  And there is no shortage of content, content that is growing exponentially every day, in fact there is an explosion of content from email, text, social media, traditional business applications, newspapers, video, music and books.

Open Text is essentially an ECM vendor and over the years has amassed many different brands including: Vignette, Hummingbird, LiveLink and Captaris to bolster its position and portfolio. Acquiring many discrete businesses has been no small endeavor and in fact has taken time to rationalize under one “Suite” or umbrella offering. Open Text demonstrated how the suite will serve all layers of the enterprise experience from the user level to process level integration and to the base library level. It remains to be seen just how successful this unified message will carry, Open Text themselves admits a lower than preferred penetration into existing customers

And how is Open Text innovating for the future…by learning to play the game Halo…no seriously, Tom Jenkins, Open Text Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, shared with us his newly acquired skill as a gamer, this Jenkins admits, provides him the ability to truly understand how this next generation consumes content digitally, and their expectation of the digital experience…it was probably fun too!

Expect Open Text to go deep this year…to the heart of the customer, the heart of their own business all with a focus on innovation and mobility.

Canon to Acquire Océ

Today, Canon Inc. (trading symbol CAJ) announced a public cash offer for all the shares of Océ (trading symbol OCE).  Canon intends to make an offer of € 8.60 per Share (cum dividend) for 100% of the outstanding Shares of Océ, representing a premium of 70% over Océ’s closing share price of Friday 13 November 2009 and 137% to the average share price over the last 12 months, this makes the deal worth about 1.1 billion dollars.

In the wake of other major acquisitions in the last year, particularly Ricoh’s acquisition of IKON, there has been much speculation about what Canon will do. Now that Canon has agreed to acquire Océ, it is clear that one of its strategic options has been selected. Read more »

Making Laws with XML? Not this time…

In 2006, I had the pleasure of working with several InfoTrends analysts, industry vendors, and technology users on some intriguing research entitled Multi-Channel Communications: The Content Publishing Workflow Challenge. As part of that document, we put together a solid case study on the California Legislative Bureau’s investments in XML technology for drafting bills.

The drivers for the solution were compelling — the creation of state law represents one of the most component-oriented content and collaboration-centric processes I’ve examined. Hundreds of senators and representatives may be involved from remote locations; sections of text require on-going additions and refinement up to the minute the law is passed; and the final document must be secured, archived, searchable, and widely available to participants and outsiders ASAP. XML document solutions were perfect for the purpose, and I highly recommend you check out this piece.

Fast-forward to the present day and the much-awaited/maligned stimulus bill proceeding through Congress. I awoke this morning to find this stimulus bill rendition, which the NYTimes accurately describes as “filled with hand-written copy-editing marks, insertions scrawled in the margins, deletions of whole paragraphs boxed with X’s slashing through them,and a variety of curious hash marks and other annotations.” Read more »

Analyzing the 2009 Federal Budget – $71B in IT spend

I was researching some government data this afternoon and noticed that the 2009 Federal budget had been posted as well as some analytical perspectives.

Let’s skip right to page 157 in the analysis, a section titled INTEGRATING SERVICES WITH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, which provides a discussion of the “$71 billion for Information Technology (IT) and the associated support services” that the President (Bush) had proposed. This represents a 3.8% increase over the 2008 budget, but it’s possible additional or reduced government spend by the Obama administration may change this figure. Read more »

Some pretty good earnings, eh?

The last of the major ECM vendors to report earnings this quarter has done so… Canadian software developer Open Text beat the street on Monday, reporting 11% YoY growth in revenue and 88% YoY growth in net income. Anecdotally, it’s hard to keep calling these guys “Canadian” when they have offices on almost every continent and annual revenue approaching $1B.

Open Text also announced the close of its Captaris acquisition and roadmap, which has important implications for the covergence of ECM solutions and OEM hardware. (InfoTrends’ report on the acquisition is available to Office group clients as well as through the Pub store here.) Read more »

Greenspan’s “Error” and Enterprise Solutions

Alan Greenspan’s recent testimony to Congress was quite shocking to those of us that took to him like the demigod champion of successful laissez-faire capital markets. “Yes, I’ve found a flaw,” Greenspan explained. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.” (The NY Times provides a good re-cap here.) Read more »

Interwoven announces record Q3 (and other signs we’re not doomed)

Released about 40 minutes ago, Interwoven’s (IWOV) Q3 results are truly exceptional. Highlights include:

“Record top line and bottom line results, and this is our 20th consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth.

Total revenues were a record $65.9 million, an increase of 19 percent over the third quarter of 2007.

Non-GAAP net income was a record $8.4 million, an increase of 15 percent from non-GAAP net income of $7.3 million in the third quarter of 2007.

License revenue growth was 14 percent, a clear sign we continue to take share from the competition.

Consulting, training, and software as a service revenues were $13.9 million, an increase of 37% over the third quarter of last year.”

Of course, the full release will require some vetting, and today’s conference call (5pm sharp!) should provide additional insight.

Not surprising to this analyst would be strong license growth around Interwoven’s Segmentation, Targeting, and Optimization Web Content Management (WCM) offerings, which have been [anecdotally] quite powerful and well-received. (For you “print” folks, the integrated offerings are similar to transpromo, custom communications… for the Web channel.) Read more »