Last year David Evans left ABBYY, the company focused on document recognition, document capture, and linguistic technologies and services, and within a month had launched Leafdoc, a new company, based on the outskirts of London, that offers an online OCR service along with consulting services. It’s not much of a stretch for the 23-year imaging industry veteran. In fact, it’s a natural transition.
Since the launch, Evans has been working feverishly to spread the word and bring his service to the masses. The knowledge he’s acquired during his time in the industry has been invaluable and the contacts he’s made over the years have been equally instrumental in opening doors. Last week I had an opportunity to talk to Evans about the company, the service, and his plans for growing it in the UK and bringing it to the U.S.
David Evans
What is Leafdoc’s primary focus?
Evans: Service provision is our core aim. Although we operate a successful consulting arm that helps clients build appropriate document capture strategies, we focus on the delivery of our on-line OCR service – the conversion of scanned images into searchable PDF documents – first and foremost.
You just introduced a cloud-based conversion service, tell me about that?
Evans: The Leafdoc online conversion service takes a scanned image and, in simple terms, converts it to a searchable PDF. Because your computer can now ‘look’ for words within the document, when you run a search for something you’ll be able to get back documents that existed only on paper previously and these tend to be the inbound information from your client base so you can locate ‘their’ documents far quicker and get working on their requirements sooner.
We offer e-mail, ftp and Web service API connections so no matter what size of business or user you are, there’s a convenient way to ‘talk’ to our servers and convert images into searchable PDFs. As you’d expect, we also offer more advanced services—positional metadata and so on to users needing this level of information.
It sounds like the cloud-based conversion service makes a lot of sense for many users and for Leafdoc?
Evans: You’re correct. All this is fully cloud-based (we host it all in Microsoft’s Azure clouds, in fact) and gives us unparalleled scalability. We did a calculation recently that suggests we can process some 75-million images a day if we went flat-out. And because we can charge on an as-used basis, if you don’t use our service for a couple of months, there’s no standing charge or retainer due. Of course, Azure also offers us phenomenal bandwidth and resilience. There’s absolutely no way Leafdoc could run a service to matches the 99.5 percent uptime guarantee and Internet connectivity that Azure offers us if we hosted it all ourselves.
Who do you view as your competitors?
Evans: When I started this a year ago there really wasn’t any. There were a few people doing online service who were reticent to talk about where it was and what it really offered, but over the last year or so a number have come online. Some big names are now offering something, but they typically don’t have the width mine has and are simply Web-enabling their old toolkits – and you’re not going to want to write code just to connect via ftp. So far, no one offers the e-mail, Web services API, and ftp connectors Leafdoc have available.
What’s the secret for getting businesses to embrace a cloud-based conversion service such as yours?
Evans: I think all financial VP’s and company boards are looking closely at costs and without doubt will seriously consider using an operational expense model in favor of the more traditional capital expense budget in any project they get involved with. Using our cloud service moves all the OCR costs directly over to OP Ex and minimizes other costs as well.
For resellers, what might a compensation model look like for a service such as this?
Evans: While we have a price matrix on our site, that’s really designed to cater for the occasional user. Once you can reasonably forecast the volume of data you are likely to put through our systems, we’re able to assign a suite of processing stations for your work and can pass on the cost-savings we make by not having to constantly ramp-up or remove processing capacity. In each case, I’d suggest the reseller talks to us about their requirement and we’ll work to address their needs as best we can.
What channels do you sell your products through?
Evans: Currently, we have partnerships with selected scanning bureaus in the UK who can use our service to complement their own OCR provision and we address the occasional user with our own email-to-OCR service. Our Web services API makes our service accessible from within an application. We’re currently engaged with a number of system integrators and document management software houses, all exploring the possibility this technology offers them.
Who is the target market for your products?
Evans: This is really hard to define because almost anyone who works with a computer could benefit. In practice, we find paper-intensive businesses form the ‘hard-core’ of users—finance, HR, legal and government—but to cater to the massive number of occasional users that exist, we designed an e-mail service (available on a pay-as-you-go basis) that is generating more and more interest.
If I were a business why would I be interested in Leafdoc?
Evans: If you were wearing your finance hat I’d say that outsourcing your OCR requirement to Leafdoc means you don’t have the up-front costs associated with licensing and hardware that come with buying an in-house solution. With capital expenditures being managed more tightly than ever with our offering you pay for what you use, when you use it.
As a sales VP in a scanning bureau, I’d tell you that we can keep up with your business. The more documents you send to us, the more servers we’ll start to keep up and, because there’s no additional cost to your business for this flexibility, you can have the confidence to offer your clients turn-around times others can only dream of while knowing beforehand what costs you’ll have.
If I were a reseller, why would I want to partner with Leafdoc?
Evans: The biggest benefit is I can turn capital costs into operational costs. Rather than OCR, which is an expensive hobby to get into, you need hardware and software licenses. The biggest problem BPO’s (Business Process Outsourcers) have with buying software is having to make that big investment and this gets around that entire problem because we simply charge them for the pages they process rather than the number they think they might want to process in the future: this helps with their capital expenditure. Further, anyone with a credit account with Leafdoc would be billing their customer at about the same time we invoice the partner so we also help make their cash-flow more positive.
What kind of a presence do you currently have in the U.S.?
Evans: We’re talking to a potential partner on the West coast but, at the moment there are no active partnerships in the U.S. One of the reasons I’m talking to you is that we hope to change that.
Are you looking to engage in any partnerships with hardware OEMs here in the States?
Evans: Our services are entirely cloud-based and I think the majority of hardware OEM’s are still a little nervous of attaching added value via something so far out of their control. However, we’re positive this will change. For example, Microsoft, who we use for their Azure cloud, offer us a 99.5 percent uptime guarantee so there’s no reason not to consider the cloud as a very solid platform and one an OEM can use for tertiary services.
What qualities in a reseller are you looking for?
Evans: We’re looking for partners that are comfortable in their market space and appreciate that OCR provision is a tertiary service, their core value-add being the management and care of the data, in whatever form it is in.
How are things going since you introduced the service?
Evans: We only came to market with the service in the past month or so. I’m happy with where we’re at and that we have a service people need. It’s a great place to be. There are always things you can enhance, it’s organic and I imagine our service will extend as it grows over time.
How will you gauge the success of this new introduction and what needs to happen to make this a success?
Evans: Our short-term goal is to process around two-million pages a month that have originated from partner accounts so we have a clear target in mind. To get there we’ll need to prove our value to the community and maintain a consistent and price-sensitive service.
What’s next for Leafdoc?
Evans: We provide recognition in a number of key languages and we’re looking to extend these to accommodate the Middle East and India because so many businesses have international interests these days. In addition, we’re working on adding additional value to our services in a number of ways—making it easier for clients to connect from their systems, and adding more ways for them to control and manage the work we’re processing and so on.
If a reseller is interested in learning more about Leafdoc and its products what can they do besides visiting your Website to get more information?
Evans: By far the best way is for them to talk to us directly. Personally, I’ve been involved in document capture since 1989 and have worked with users and partners from across the globe. While there are always new things to learn, I believe I have the experience to understand most requirements and look forward to talking through some interesting solutions that add significant value to a partnership. My direct e-mail address is evans@leafdoc.com.
