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David Tyler: How has the merger impacted customers and partners - especially in the UK - so far?
Jennifer Van Lent: Essentially, as Wayne Davey told you in the interview you did with him in March of this year, we've been largely focused on expanding into new markets. The Middle East is a good example, where DICOM had a Dubai office, while the Spigraph presence was in North Africa: we've been 'building out' our presence in markets like this as well as building on the foundation of our existing successful markets such as Germany, France, the Netherlands and of course the UK.

More specifically we've been focused on developing our strategic solutions, both in horizontal areas such as invoice automation, digital mailroom and document on-boarding, and also our vertical solutions for industries including finance, healthcare, government, accountancy and insurance. Those are the verticals where we've had the most traction and been able to leverage the biggest successes.

DT: Can you expand on the kind of solutions that you can offer now that perhaps you couldn't previously?
JVL: Obviously we deliver solutions for scanning and advanced capture for any type of user from small, through mid-market, to the enterprise. Specifically since the Spigraph merger I've been involved in a lot of discussions around how we now leverage our collective knowledge. We've been able to build out some robust solution offerings that are very specific to industry needs.

We've announced an accountancy solution in the Netherlands which is soon to be launched in the UK, for instance. And this is a direct result of the ability to look at what both DICOM and Spigraph had done in the past and identify bespoke offerings that we could scale for different markets. This year we've also seen a very heavy focus on both invoice automation and mailroom business.

DT: Presumably this more solutions-focused approach requires a high level of application as well as technology expertise among your staff?
JVL: Exactly: the main benefits of the merger right now come out of leveraging our subject matter expertise into new markets and then being able to do a 'knowledge transfer' to other regions. As an example, we've been very successful at DICOM in the last couple of years in large, highly complex and customised projects around large scale production scanning, using the likes of ibml and Kodak high volume scanners. Now we're able to leverage this experience into new markets - we have employees with almost unique expertise in the use of ibml's ImageTrac devices in these large scale projects. We can take that technical expertise and consultancy skills and leverage it across the whole group in all sorts of complex tenders.

Having sat in on some of these meetings myself, when this very specific deep knowledge is required it becomes evident very quickly that this person really knows what they're doing! Again this ability to take the right people and move them according to the needs of a given project, is another way for us to deliver added value to our strategic partners - and it also helps us to differentiate from the broad line distribution companies. This is something that has gone very well for us in the UK so far, as has been evidenced by some of our recent wins.

DT: Tell us more about the new markets you are targeting - and the products you're targeting them with.
JVL: We're expanding our general product portfolio: on the vertical side we have some very specific offerings for new markets, such as the accountancy solution I mentioned. This has been developed in cooperation with Canon and one of our strategic partners in the Netherlands, and it's been very well received so far. The majority of the market for that is SMEs; simply because around 80% of accountancy businesses come into that SME sector. That said, we do also have some very large accountancies that our partner has been working with. It's another good example of how we had some knowledge coming from Spigraph, some from DICOM, and we brought it together with a targeted focus to get early success and then expand it into new areas.

Another good example of progress is with Kofax: we have a strategic pan-European relationship with them. We've identified key markets where we are building closer relationships with Kofax Silver Partners, as well as developing new partnerships in other markets. Once again we've been able to leverage the skill sets of both organisations to enable some pretty large project wins. What's been great to see is this situation where effectively one plus one equals three.

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