Art Post
Photizo’s Global Transform has concluded for 2012. I’ll be attending the conference in Scottsdale for 2013.
About two months ago I wrote a blog about “Managed Documents the Next Big Thing” which I related to managed print. The thought was to have an MFP connect to the cloud, and then scan documents directly to a cloud based document management system or a folder in the cloud. After the documents were there the dealer would then manage the documents to have them indexed, OCR’d. The dealer could then charge either a monthly fee for the service or a click charge that could be added to the existing maintenance agreement. The benefit to the customer would be no upfront cost, no training (except to retrieve the documents), no internal IT support, and no maintenance fees. The dealer could then remain “more sticky” in the account and offer the value added service.
While at the Transform Conference I ran across an Enterprise Content Management solution that was right up my alley. The Intellivue ECM platform is available as a cost- per-page model where you pay a low monthly fee based on the number of pages you use to the software to manage. There is no upfront cost! Billing would be enabled on a cost-per-page model, there would be one cost per page for a black scan and one cost per page (higher than the black cost) for a color scan, the reasoning for the higher cost for the color is that the color scan created a larger file size. With this SaaS solution a company can realize and immediate return on investment from the first month Intellivue is deployed.
Another excellent benefit to the dealer is that they can charge professional services for the installation and training to the end user. I’m more of a fan of the dealer performing the indexing of the documents for the end user and I’m not entirely sure this can be accomplished with Intellivue. I will be making a call to them to see if there is a way this can be done.
The concept is for the user to scan2file from the MFP, the user would then index the file and submit to the ECM on the cloud (this is the part I’d like to see the dealer do so you it could be a seem less solution for the customer and you would be able to bill professional services). Intellivue then retains the document for archival in the cloud or premise solution. Intellivue would then create a monthly total of pages in the archive and tabulates the monthly bill based on the cost per page. Intellivue can then feed the monthly page totals and cost to the MPS billing software (I’m hoping that this will also work with MFP billing software). Your MPS software would then generate the total bill, including line items for hardware, supplies, services and Intellivue. Royalties are paid to the reseller from the ECM revenues collected.
The power of this solution is that there is no upfront cost. I see Intellivue as a tremendous value for the SMB customer. For too long the SMB customer has shied away from content management due to the upfront cost, the training, the IT infrastructure and the thought that they would have to dedicate and employee to operate the software.
BTW, this is the first blog in a series of 7 for the top 7 solutions at Transform 2012 Conference.
Good selling!
