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 Delving
into NSi’s Upward Trajectory with
NSi Vice President of Marketing Mike Morper
If NSi
(Notable Solutions, Inc.) isn’t on your radar as one of the
premiere solutions providers for the office equipment dealer
channel, it certainly ought to be.
NSi is best known for its flagship product, AutoStore, a solution
that captures paper and electronic documents from a copier,
scanner, or printer, and then processes them and routes them into
the user’s business system or application. The company’s worldwide
partners in the MFP and network scanner world encompass Fujitsu,
HP, Kodak, Konica Minolta, Kyocera Mita, Lexmark, Ricoh, Savin,
Lanier, Sharp, and Xerox. NSi’s AutoStore functions as an
information on-ramp for those vendor’s MFPs and network-connected
scanners.
NSi uses a partner-only sales model and its products are sold
through digital office device manufacturers, resellers, and
systems integrators. To date, the company’s software works with
more than 500 different MFPs with a total of 225,000 devices
connected worldwide. NSi’s customer base is at 4,800 and growing.
In
addition to marketing the product under the AutoStore name, it’s
also relabeled as KyoCapture by Kyocera Mita, SMARTdocument Travel
by Xerox, and DocAccel by IKON.
ENX recently had the opportunity to speak with Mike Morper,
NSi’s vice president of marketing. We’ve never had a serious
sit-down with anyone from NSi before, and this was a golden
opportunity to learn more about a company whose products expand
the capabilities of the MFP.
How’s business?
Morper:
Business is great. Our fiscal year ends June 30th and we’re
expecting somewhere between 25-30 percent year-over-year growth.
Mike Morper
NSi VP of Marketing
What do you
attribute that to?
Morper:
We see a growing demand for distributed capture that allows
knowledge workers to introduce assets into an existing business
process. About this time last year we rolled out Version 5 of the
AutoStore platform and we’ve seen a nice pick up because of it.
We’re also seeing continued strength in our channels. In North
America, Ricoh North America and Ricoh Canada are now selling our
AutoStore product and those are two net new additions. We were
just named a Xerox ‘Partner of the Year’ and IKON’s year over year
growth with us continues at a rocket pace.
You’re doing
well worldwide too, aren’t you?
Morper:
Over the last 18 months we’ve expanded into Latin America and they
already represent 2 percent of our revenue. One thing that worked
really well for us is we started in Europe first even though we
are a North American company. Eighteen months ago Europe
represented over 50 percent of our revenue which is strange for an
American company. Europe is continuing to drive significant
revenue for us; however we have aligned our revenue mix to a more
traditional North American/ European ratio.
You’ve got
AutoStore, AutoStore Express, SmartTicket, OpenForms, and
QuickCapture. Are all of these solutions based on AutoStore and
can they all be used by the average AutoStore user and sold by the
MFP dealer?
Morper:
I characterize most of those as sibling products. AutoStore is the
primary product, it comes in two flavors—AutoStore Workflow and
AutoStore Express. The primary difference between the two is the
route components in Workflow. All the connectivity for enterprise
content management systems is through our Workflow license. For
the dealer community, 99 percent of them will align with the
Express product. Express provides out-of-the-box delivery to
SharePoint and any network share such as a user’s Home folder. A
Google Docs connector is about to be made available, providing
customers a means to deliver scanned documents directly into the
Google cloud. In addition to these capabilities, Express also
outputs XML data, making it great for integrating into a
customer’s internally developed applications. Connectors for
delivering into enterprise content management systems such as
IBM’s Filenet P8, Content Manager, EMC Documentum, etc. are only
available with the Workflow product.
SmartTicket is an add on to the Workflow product that provides the
ability to generate a printed ticket that already has pointers to
metadata that’s referenced on a bar code on the sheet itself. The
idea is you could put that cover page on top of a document prior
to scanning. Instead of doing a bunch of data entry on the front
panel of the MFP, you place the documents with the SmartTicket
cover page in the MFP’s document feeder, hit the green button and
off it goes. And the metadata that was already entered with a Web
form, which generated the cover page, catches up with that
document and routes it through the rest of the AutoStore workflow.
We are seeing great success with this solution in local government
as well as financial customers.
QuickCapture
Pro works with both products and is ideal for desktop users who
need a single-function TWAIN scanner to do some basic scanning of
documents that need to be integrated into an AutoStore workflow.
It’s a very capable, but simplified tool for knowledge workers.
OpenForms is an AutoStore Workflow-aligned product. It is a
sophisticated forms-recognition package used mostly by our
enterprise accounts where there is some kind of business need for
identifying document types and then automatically extracting key
data off of the form itself. It’s not something we aggressively
sell, but something we provide as a supplement to AutoStore for
customers who need to solve a specific business problem.
How do dealers
price this product?
Morper:
Street price is $820 for the Express product and all of our
licensing is based on the number of devices connected to the
server. So you can have one device for $820, but there is scaling
in cost savings as you buy multiple licenses. For AutoStore
Workflow, it’s $1,200 per device.
Why do the
OEMs select NSi’s AutoStore?
Morper:
Several reasons. First, AutoStore supports more than 24 back-end
content management systems and the flexibility of supporting
multiple systems at one time is definitely a driver. Secondly, one
of the unique differentiators of AutoStore is that it can natively
support multiple device manufacturer’s equipment in a single
environment. This is ideal for large organizations that may have
made purchases from different vendors over the years, but still
need a consistent means of managing their MFP-based document
capture workflows. Lastly, when you think back to what’s happened
to the economy over the past two years, the device manufacturers
have watched their year-over-year device numbers plummet. When
your primary business is selling hardware and nobody’s buying
hardware, you have to find another way of meeting shareholder
expectation. Because of this, we suspect organizations within our
channel are going back to their installed base and selling
AutoStore, which gives them something to sell besides hardware
during this troubling economic time.
Would that be
the same response if I were to ask you why a dealer would select
AutoStore?
Morper:
Yes, I think so. In general, where dealers find AutoStore or
whatever private label derivative attractive is when they have
three, four, five or more of these devices and they don’t want to
set up templates to be able to replicate across all of those
devices. Instead they want to have central administration. That’s
where those folks find value. There’s some very basic out-of-the-
box capabilities with these MFPs and if you just need to scan
something to e-mail, it’ll do perfectly fine. But the moment
you’re managing multiple devices and want secure delivery, that’s
when the built-in capabilities of the devices come up a little
short. Instead, you’ll probably want to run a server-operated
capture subsystem to do that orchestration, central management,
and secure delivery into the various back-end systems.
What does a
dealer or direct sales operation need to do to be successful
selling your products?
Morper:
The folks most successful are the ones who understand business
processes the best. If an existing dealer’s customer comes to that
dealer and says we really want to search scanned documents because
we want to get rid of paper, a successful dealer is going to ask
that user what do you want to accomplish and what are you going to
do with those documents after they’re scanned?
The
dealer needs to be the trusted advisor and help the client
understand what they want to accomplish by scanning. Do they just
want to be able hand something off to one of their customers or
vendors or do they just want to be able to archive these scanned
documents for later retrieval? They can start very basic, which is
scan into a folder, or they can grow in sophistication by
integrating it into any number of their business applications such
as a Great Plains system. Those are the ones that tend to have the
greatest success using our AutoStore products.
How do you
support the dealer channel selling your products?
Morper:
Ninety-nine percent of our sales go through the device
manufacturers, so they end up being the Level 1 support for that
product. That said, for dealers who are between a rock and a hard
place, we won’t turn them away. We want them to be successful, so
if they call we’ll take the call and make sure they’re rocking and
rolling.
What do
dealers who aren’t currently AutoStore users want to know about
the product or products?
Morper:
Most want to know, does it work with SharePoint and can we create
searchable documents? The answer is yes, both in Express and
Workflow. And of course, what devices does it support?
Do you see
your hardware and software partnerships growing to beyond where
they are now?
Morper:
As the world goes forward there’s not a doubt in my mind we will
probably take another one or two content management solutions on.
As I reflect on the last year, our customers asked for Docuware –
so we added it. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve got over two dozen
that we ship with the product today, and between those and just
writing to a network share, that probably covers 95 percent plus
of the addressable market right now. But the needs of our
customers always change, and delivering on those needs is what we
do. As for new device manufacturers, we already have native device
support for greater than 75 percent of the market. A significant
opportunity would need to be presented to us for us to take on
additional vendors at this time.
How do you see
AutoStore evolving over the next 12-18 months?
Morper:
We’re coming out with a 5.5 release before the end of the calendar
year. We’ll be introducing several enhancements, everything from
enhancing user authentication at the front panel to using the
front panel to look up user credentials across all the device
manufacturers we support. Right now we do that natively with Xerox
and Ricoh. Through scripting we can do that with all the other
device manufacturers. We want to make that out-of-the-box
functionality so you don’t have to be a scripting wizard to
accomplish that task.
We are
also introducing a significant new update to the SmartTicket
product and that’s going to be included with 5.5. One of the new
capabilities is you can go to the SmartTicket Web page, create
your ticket, create your own custom workflow and then save it as a
button directly to the front panel of the MFP. We’re pretty
confident this is going to be well received.
Finally,
we’re introducing additional enterprise capabilities. We’re
continuing to work with some really big customers. We’ve got a
couple of big customers that have thousands of units deployed.
Those types of organizations want enhanced tools to track the
number of users who are using the system and the volume of work
going through the system. We’re going to make the dashboard a
little more robust to give them a better idea of how the system is
operating.
And as
6.0 marches on we’ll continue to provide more intuitive ways of
helping the person that walks up to the device get in and get out
as quickly as possible. And we’ll continue to put more
intelligence into the server.
How do you see
business growing over the next 12 months?
Morper:
We believe we’ll continue to see good healthy double-digit growth
because we see a couple of key relationships starting to kick off
here. Ricoh in North America is starting to bear fruit. In June we
announced a strategic relationship with Konica Minolta in North
America and Europe. We’re already seeing significant run rate of
business opportunity with them in Europe.
Kyocera is a new partner in Europe this past year and we’re
beginning to see nice growth with them. Our European operations
have been strong year over year and it now looks like there’s
going to be some strategic relationships announced in the next
four months or so out of Germany. We’re expecting some nice
healthy European growth next year and some of that will spill over
to North America and Latin America.
Finally,
we have this great 5.5 release coming out at the end of the
calendar year that we think will continue to spur interest in the
AutoStore products. I’m confident we’ll continue to go up and to
the right, but will it be a 75 percent clip or a 5 percent clip?
Time will
tell.
Scott
Cullen has been writing about the office equipment industry since
1986. For more information on Notable Solutions, check out
www.nsiautostore.com.
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