Mike Morper
This may be the biggest acquisition of the year…so far. On January 10, NSI announced that it had acquired the enterprise output management (EOM) division of Barr Systems. Barr Systems EOM solution offers secure print delivery and cost management capabilities to vertical industries, including state and local governments, financial services, and healthcare organizations.
The acquisition allows NSI to offer a single informaton exchange platform with secure document capture (mobile/MFP/desktop/data streams) as well as secure document output from MFPs and printers. For NSI customers the acquisition means they now have an enterprise-level solution with user authentication and cost accounting as well as a solution that delivers incremental mobile, AutoStore value.
“This provides a single informaton exchange platform,” says Mike Morper, vice president of marketing, with NSI. “We’ve always done a great job with capture, collecting [data] from MFPs, desktops, and mobile applications, then extracting information out of it to figure out what that document is, and then finding a great place to deliver that information.”
Morper adds, “The problem has been the output side of the life cycle whether it needs to be output into an office printer or taking that transformed document and reintroducing it into a business process, which fundamentally has been a gap that we have not been able to deliver upon when you look upon an information lifecycle in its totality.”
Historically Barr has focused primarily on true enterprise output, taking print streams from mainframe systems and data streams from host systems such as ERP systems and transforming those into documents, and then outputting them to production printers or office printers and MFPs.
“When we took a look at the information lifecycle, we realized we definitely had a gap and we decided we were going to either home grow this ourselves or find someone with proven technology and a bunch of happy partners and customers, and if the price was right maybe we could snag them and that’s exactly what we did here,” says Morper.
The acquisition will allow NSI to compete head to head with Equitrac and enable NSI to deliver a product to a hybrid world in which an organization has traditional produciton print needs as well as office output needs. They’ll be able to take information from mainframes and transform them into documents, which are PDFs, etc., and deliver them to any of the 40+ content management systems that AutoStore connects to today.
“Now we’re taking the marriage of these two great products and taking the result of this marriage and doing innovative things with the information being captured from these legacy systems, and delivering it into these final destinations,” states Morper. “It also does a great job with print streams so users can print from desktop applications, mainframes, and deliver to any destination. And we can take the same secure office print offering we’ve had for about a year and swap out the engine we’ve been licensing so our customers can now have a consolidated platform that has all of this. We can take information from anywhere, interpret it, determine what’s salient, what’s important, and deliver it to any number of destinations.”
NSI has rebranded Barr EOM as NSI Output Manager and is offering it in two flavors. The first as an office offering that will be MFP and office printer centric.
“We will become a primary authenticating agent, which means we’ll be getting into the card swipe business so if someone wants to swipe a card we now have a robust reporting engine that provides details of all activities an individual does whether he does it from the desktop or multiple output requests at the printer itself,” notes Morper. “It has a rules engine that identifies where specific individuals can print to or what they can print. Large organizations with a repro center, the rules engine will interpret a request and redirect print jobs to the repro center and deliver the job so it can be processed in a more cost effective manner.”
On the enterprise side, they now have a product that many organizations are using already.
It turns out that NSI and Barr Systems have been targeting many of the same verticals over the years, so there will be familiarity there whether it’s the enterprise or the office. Those verticals encompass financial services, insurance, manufacturing, education, and higher education.
“This gives us an opportunity to fulfill this vision of being able to complete the full information life cycle from capturing information, interpreting it, delivering it to the right location, and outputting it back to a printer or MFP or back into another application,” concludes Morper.
As a result of this acquisition, NSi will open a new office in Gainesville, Florida where it will operate as the company’s Output Management Center of Excellence.
