Square 9’s Neighborhood community.
If it wasn’t already, it’s safe to say that the document imaging industry has reached a turning point where solutions are as critical as hardware among a dealer’s and reseller’s product offerings. The upshot is that dealers and resellers are on a never-ending quest to find a solutions partner that can not only help them differentiate themselves in a highly competitive selling environment, but provide the much needed support to ensure their solutions selling success.
That’s where Square 9, a provider of both cloud-enabled and on premise content management solutions, fits into the picture.
“We help businesses work more efficiently through automation of their business processes,” says Stephen Young, president and CEO. “We don’t talk about document management as much anymore; our focus is on helping drive efficiency in any organization by automating many of the things businesses do on a daily basis.”
Young and company are clearly onto something, especially when one considers the company’s growth rate. From 2010 through the start of 2014, Square 9 grew an impressive 448 percent. That’s right, 448 percent.
“We’re looking to continue that trend this year,” says Young. “After the first two months, we’re already up 42 percent year over year.”
Since 2006, Square 9 has grown from six employees to 62 with Young predicting that number to expand to 75 or so by the end of 2015.
Something else that Square 9 is doing right besides building great products and growing like crazy is having a strong business model to go with a solid channel that sells its products to more than 12,600 customers.
History Lesson
Collaboration is key at Square 9.
Square 9’s origins date back to 2001 when it was a division of InfiNet Business Systems, an ECM solutions provider and software integration house. InfiNet Business Systems delivered document driven solutions and also developed custom solution extenders for technology providers, including Kofax and Sharp. In 2005, a separate product development division was created to focus on the development of standalone solutions for document capture and workflow.
The most recent incarnation of Square 9, and the Square 9 that spun off from InfiNet and still operates today, was originally founded by Young and two partners in 2006 in a coffee shop in New Haven’s historic Ninth Square District.
“They had free Internet and great coffee, so that’s where we began developing the concept and the early stages of SmartSearch,” recalls Young.
In 2006 Square 9 Softworks was separately incorporated as a result of the tremendous growth in its SmartSearch product line.
“We were a young upstart company trying to change the perception and model of enterprise content management,” adds Young. “Today, I believe we’ve been able to strongly influence the direction of the market and are much more focused now on optimizing the opportunities for ECM and driving that next generation, rather than trying to change the model.”
A Proven Technology Platform
Between its standard and optional capabilities, Square 9’s flagship product, SmartSearch, can meet any document management needs from capture and routing, to OCR, to user initiated and completely automated workflows.
As the company’s market share continued to grow with the development of an international channel sales model, additional products were developed and released. Today, the Square 9 product suite includes GlobalCapture for automating document capture and image processing, GlobalForms, a web-based solution for replacing paper based forms processes, GlobalSync, a unique hybrid cloud document storage solution, and GlobalSearch, a cross platform web client for document delivery. With the release of GlobalSearch in 2011, Square 9 extended its platform to include a Web 2.0 technology stack. These advancements in technology have allowed Square 9 to embrace true cross platform compatibility, including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera. Also gaining in popularity is the GlobalForms eForms creator, which is driving a lot of business these days. GlobalForms helps customers create dynamic web-based business automation.
“SmartSearch is the base platform for building those document centric solutions,” explains Young. “The rest of the parts create complementary solutions. Because SmartSearch also includes GlobalSearch we’ve given the user the ability to work either through a LAN or Web client. That gives them more flexibility at no additional charge.”
In addition to its software development division, Square 9 also develops and delivers company-specific integrated solutions with its professional services practice. The Square 9 Professional Services Team helps organizations develop greater workflow efficiencies by integrating ECM with line of business applications through additions including web-based forms design and variable data printing.
Customer Appreciation
The Development Room at Square 9.
There’s no single reason why dealers and resellers select Square 9, there are several. “First, you have to commit yourself to constantly evolving your product,” emphasizes Young. “Markets change all the time and so do the needs of partners, so even if you have a great product you’ve got to continue to reinvest in it.”
On average Square 9 develops about 40 new feature enhancements each year in addition to product development.
The company has also wrapped a strong support infrastructure around its products, including pre- and post-sales support to ensure that its dealers and resellers are successful. “That’s what it’s all about,” says Young. “If a new dealer or reseller tries to take you on and they don’t have success, it’s going to be a short-lived relationship.”
Although not everyone needs the same level of support, Square 9 has resources in place to provide as little or as much support as necessary to ensure the success of their resellers. That’s important when dealers are being bombarded with a battery of new solutions all the time.
“A lot of dealers have so many different products and it’s difficult for them to be successful without a certain level of support from the factory,” explains Young. “In addition, our regional sales team includes a dedicated solutions engineering team. This is an overlay to our regional sales directors and they do everything from product demonstrations, scoping calls, pricing configurations, workflow analysis, etc. The important thing is they ensure that the project is scoped and configured correctly based on the customer’s needs to ensure a higher rate of success.”
Square 9’s professional services team is available to assist with implementations or augment services that the dealer might not provide, such as workflow design or SQL scripting. “We not only focus on our solutions, we also provide support for third party products,” says Young. “For example, if you’re working with PlanetPress or you need an advanced capture solution like ABBYY FlexiCapture, we can give you that one throat to choke.”
Steve Young, Square 9’s leader.
Another asset is Square 9’s Help Desk, which Young describes as “World Class.”
“Across our industry, support is frequently measured in hours or days, but at Square 9, we’re focused on delivering it in minutes.”
When asked what’s the one thing most resellers he talks to for the first time don’t seem to know about Square 9, Young pinpoints the company’s business model. “They’re usually familiar with our products, but they don’t know about our model. We had a training class yesterday for about 12 new dealers. When we reviewed the levels of support that we provide them, compared to what they’ve seen [from other solutions providers] it draws a very sharp contrast. It’s a big reason why we attract so many resellers and a big reason why we retain such loyalty in our existing channels.”
Another reason dealers and resellers select Square 9 is because they’re easy to do business with. It helps that Young started as a dealer reselling other vendors’ products. “I’ve worked as a manufacturer and as a dealer and the truth is dealers have a wide range of choices of solutions providers and if you’re not going to work collaboratively with them, you’re not going to retain their loyalty.”
A Horizontal Approach
While other document management companies take a vertical marketing approach, Square 9 approaches the market horizontally. Square 9 offers ‘Purchase to Pay,’ a solution for Accounts Payable automation, ‘Hire to Retire’ for HR on boarding, and contracts management with integrated e-signature support. “With these solutions, you can walk into almost any organization because nearly every organization has bills to pay,” notes Young, who adds that accounts payable processing accounts for more than 60 percent of Square 9’s new installations. “It’s an area that everyone understands; they see the efficiency, and use that as a starting point. We work across any number of vertical markets too, but it’s much more of a horizontal approach.”
Trend Setting
In any technology business, one must be cognizant of trends and react accordingly. That’s what Square 9 has done consistently since 2006. The most significant trends impacting businesses today are mobility and the cloud. “If you look at our recent and go-forward product strategy, it’s heavily weighted in those areas,” states Young.
Perhaps the biggest trend that Young expects to have an impact on is business process automation. “This can grow even faster than the cloud because there’s such an ROI behind it,” he maintains. “People have been accustomed to document routing and what they’re starting to see is they can capture high-value data from those scanned images and instead of just using that to file a document away they can feed that data to a line of business application. For example, we’ll extract all the information off a vendor invoice and instead of just filing that document away, we’re creating a voucher in Microsoft Dynamics or creating a payable in QuickBooks. What it’s doing is eliminating a lot of that manual data entry to allow organizations to work more efficiently. Since the days of the great recession, people are trying to do more with less and you can save on back office expenses and make revenue by generating opportunities and more customer facing activities; I think it’s going to pay dividends and that’s what customers need to compete in a global climate.”
OEM Partnerships
As Square 9 has grown and been accepted by an increasing number of dealers and resellers, it’s impossible to minimize the impact partnerships with the OEMs have had on the company’s growth. OEM partners include Toshiba, Konica Minolta, OKI Data, and Xerox via the Global Imaging channel.
Still, Young has a realistic perspective of where Square 9 fits into the big picture, whether it’s with the dealer channel or the OEMs.
“We understand we’re a small part of what the dealers do and what the manufacturers do. We’re a strategic decision. If you look at some of our largest dealers, we may represent only a couple percentage points of their revenue. What we do is help them sell more equipment. When you look at a company like Toshiba or Konica Minolta, and look at us, this is a strategic play to help them to drive equipment sales through our integrated software solutions. Conversely we’re looking at them not only as a manufacturer of office equipment, but as a sales organization. These guys are very talented at going out and attacking a market, and building on their success in the equipment space. When you look at the number of feet on the street that these companies represent it is obvious the value they bring to us. We wouldn’t be where we are today without our OEM partners.”
Looking Ahead
Young and company have high hopes for 2015 based on the great start out of the gate this year. “With the activity we’re seeing, the rollouts and our OEM relationships, we’re projecting continued revenue of over 40 percent.”
Square 9 is also aggressively moving into Latin America, driven in part by some of the company’s OEM partners. “We’re also expecting for the channel to build in the UK and Western Europe, a place we started in towards the end of last year,” adds Young.
From a product perspective he’s excited about the release of a new web-based platform scheduled for the end of October. That platform will be prominently featured at Square 9’s annual dealer and customer event, Encompass 2015, to be held October 20-23 in Clearwater, Florida.
“We’re expecting this platform, coupled with a new analytics module that we’re releasing at the same time, will provide our dealers with an exciting new level of services they can offer to customers,” says Young.
In addition, the company, having outgrown its facility in downtown New Haven, will soon be moving to a new location that will allow them to triple in size.
All in all, it’s been a terrific first nine years for Square 9, and all signs point to even more upward and outward mobility going forward.
Contact Information
Square 9 129 Church St.
New Haven, CT 06510 Web: www.square-9.com
E-mail: sales@square-9.com
Tel: (203) 789-0889
