On February 18, 2010 BERTL analysts were invited to a Nuance briefing at the LDI Times Square Showroom in New York City to find the answer to that question.  While Nuance has quickly become a company to watch for scanning, faxing, printing and OCR, they’ve also secured a larger niche of the content management business with the acquisition of eCopy.  The solution offerings of these two companies will greatly increase the number of enterprise applications; such as Microsoft SharePoint and Oracle and give Nuance a strong presence in this competitive MFP industry.

Nuance Communications is a publicly held company (NASDAQ: NUAN) with over 6,000 employees worldwide. Their General Manager and Senior Vice President, Robert Weideman, shared with us that eCopy was the 38th acquisition for Nuance.  With 1st Quarter earnings for the Document Imaging Division of $35.8 million, up 111%, it is clear that this move was made at the right time.  This strategic move has aided Nuance in becoming uniquely tooled to establish a leading position in document automation solutions with their MFP partners.  These impressive numbers made us believers, but when Robert told the group “this acquisition has combined the best of the best and will allow Nuance to turbo-charge the MFP industry by filling gaps to deliver universal benefit via MFP solutions”, we knew the day would be filled with more strategic information than we could possibly retain.

As we reviewed statistics of the two companies in their PowerPoint Presentation, one could only think this is truly a powerful union.  The offerings of eCopy and Nuance Professional Services, and their unique partnerships, definitely complement each other with very little cross over or redundancy.  Nuance has a Microsoft Gold Certified Partnership level, and sits on the Microsoft SharePoint Design Review Group, while eCopy has strong core technologies with their unparalleled SDK connector offerings.

Dennis Amorosano, Sr. Director Solutions Marketing & Business Support for Canon Production Systems Divisions, talked at length on how the Canon/eCopy valued relationship has evolved since Canon first incorporated their scanning technology in 1996.  It is the #1 selling software product worldwide for Canon, and is expected to continue with Nuance at the helm.  Dennis stated, “Their relationship has been recognized as the ‘BEST’  partnership in the industry and they will continue to establish ‘Best Practices’ in distributed scanning and document workflow.”  He went on to state that Canon and Nuance are ahead of the curve as they have progressed from first generation eMail Scan to File to second generation security and connectors and are developing in the next generation of personalization and business process automation.  Personalization will be available for any industry, which translates into time savings for the end user who will only see what is pertinent to them, cost savings to the company as workflow will be automated, and use of paper and human resources will be greatly reduced.

Nuance capabilities span a myriad of capabilities such as speech recognitionas that has transformed the lives of over 10 Billion people with their Speech Technology that is built in to phones, cars, navigations systems and dictation systems to name a few.  Leading cell phone manufacturers such as Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, etc. either OEM or incorporate the Nuance technology today on over 1 billion handsets.  Most automotive solutions available today in all leading automobile manufacturers incorporate Nuance for hands free voice calling, climate and stereo control and destination entry voice commands on their GPS devices. When we were told that the GPS manufacturer TomTom was working towards full voice commands using their technology, I for one was relieved that I can now talk back to that device while driving in circles in Manhattan and it may actually respond.  Robert Weideman shared that Nuance is continuing to improve MFP user experience by refining Voiceprint Authentication for indentifying users to the network, reducing data entry by replacing typing, and banks are using this as another security level in user authentication.  Their innovations in Voice Command and Control were likened to an “Onstar for the MFP” by providing step by step maintenance instructions for the end user to drive down service costs.

The old saying “time is money” can truly be seen in the statistics supplied by Canon, as the average professional spends  37.1 hours a week managing information, a staggering amount . In today’s world, we have to create conditions where employees will want to draw upon their intellectual capital to contribute to the company’s goals.  Chris Strammiello, Nuance Vice President, Marketing and Product Strategy, shared how Nuance is creating a platform on which we can command that innovation by driving information in new and exciting ways. Their technology of turn-key processing for invoices and freeform recognition is realizing 50%-80% time savings for a fast return on a company’s investment.  Nuance is providing the knowledge worker  a new means of communication by offering tools such as their Search & Destroy technology which automates redaction allowing  the worker to read only what is pertinent.   In addition, the Nuance eBooks solution integrates devices from Amazon Kindle, Apple IPad, Sony Reader, etc. and extends them into business documents.  First they convert the document to a native format for a better reading experience, then transform them to audio through Nuance text to speech. 

Finally, we learned that Nuance has introduced the free Nuance PDF Reader, an alternative to Adobe® Reader that is smaller, more secure, and for the first time connects desktop PDF with cloud-based PDF-to-Microsoft Office conversion services. The free Nuance PDF Reader also enables PDF form save, annotations and Microsoft SharePoint features not available in alternatives.

“Nuance PDF Converter Professional has become the number one alternative to Adobe Acrobat® because it delivers all the rich features users need in a PDF, and implements useful features not available from alternatives,” said Weideman,  “Nuance is proud to be the first to deliver a free PDF reader that connects to cloud-based productivity software in a reader that is smaller, safer and feature rich.”

The free Nuance PDF Reader supports Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7 and is available immediately at www.nuance.com/PDFReader in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. Additional languages will be introduced in the future. Until further notice, users of the Nuance PDF Reader will have free and unlimited access to the www.NuancePDF.com cloud conversion service from directly within the Reader.