For the past 15 years DocuLex has been one of the industry’s premier document management providers with more than 1,000 customers using its Archive Studio content management software suite. If you are unaware, Archive Studio is a browser-based solution for businesses looking for secure and instant document access. It’s available as a server-based product or as an on-demand cloud-based software as a service offering. Recently I had the opportunity to speak with DocuLex President David Bailey about the challenges DocuLex has faced this past year and the current focus on growing its distribution channel.
It’s a crazy time and a lot of businesses are experiencing ups and downs. I’m sure DocuLex can attest to that, particularly with what’s been happening at Ricoh, one of your more significant partners?
David Bailey
Bailey: Ricoh is a big distributor of ours and has experienced a year of transition and adjustment to change with regard to the IKON relationship. In turn, DocuLex and probably other Ricoh partners have experienced transition as well.
I understand a challenge was that IKON wasn’t a DocuLex partner and was not as familiar with the company and its products?
Bailey: When IKON came in they said, ‘We aren’t familiar with DocuLex, so how are we going to support it?’ Ricoh, as a longtime partner and DocuLex supporter, then stepped in to familiarize IKON with the benefits of offering Archive Studio and got us added to the unified vendor list. We look forward to working with the new organization.
With regard to channel development, what has DocuLex been working on this past year?
Bailey: We’re starting to pick up more VARs such as networking VARs, service bureaus, and records centers—companies that don’t rely on selling copy machines. We’re also signing more independent dealers.
Why does a dealer or VAR choose DocuLex?
Bailey: They go with a company they can count on. If you take our product and compare it to a dozen other ones out there, some are browser-based like ours, some our Windows-based, but when it comes down to the feature set there’s probably not a whole lot of difference between one and the other. It’s hard nowadays to have that golden feature that’s going to blow everybody away. I think those days are gone.
So what else is there? There’s how well you market the product and how well you support your dealers and customers. The feedback we get, and if you look at the testimonials on our Website, you see quite a few from a support perspective. That’s what separates us from other companies.
So support is the big differentiator?
Bailey: I’m not saying other people don’t have good support, I’m just saying we bend over backwards to support our customers and dealers. Even the Ricoh branches and our independent dealers take comfort in knowing our support department is going to help them install or have the discussion with their customers about their needs. We make their jobs easy. We have a lot of people who have been with us for 7-8 years—that’s also what separates us from a lot of the competition.
Even though sales reps sell Archive Studio, it’s also promoted and supported through the reseller’s service department, correct?
Bailey: That’s who the reps count on for installation and picking and choosing the right product, so DocuLex works hard to educate its resellers.
What kind of dealer makes a good fit for DocuLex?
Bailey: They obviously need a motivated sales staff that wants to sell some form of solution, not just a box or hardware. Then they need some form of technical support behind the sales person, someone who is their go-to person and someone who is our go-to person. It could be one person or more than one, but somebody who is technically qualified to understand what a network is and understand IIS settings, and understand server software. It’s those with some sort of internal IT support that work best.
Say they have all of that, what can you do to help them be successful?
Bailey: We can provide many forms of sales support and tools for our partners, to include testimonials, referrals, case studies, and demos for specific industries. We do want to lead the account once the sales people have identified a need. Usually they do a demo, and once they qualify the deal our sales reps try to stay involved with the sales person and the potential customer. Once the deal is closed, our support people support them directly and the dealer shares in that revenue. It is a very complementary relationship – The dealer finds the deal, leads the deal to us, and we take it from there. They seem to like that. They want to get out and sell the next deal. They don’t want to be married to one deal.
What are some of the things dealers are looking for when they inquire about DocuLex?
Bailey: Lately, a lot have said we need a good hosting solution and we need a good workflow solution. That seems to be the drivers for them to look for something different from what they have. We’ve heard that quite a bit in the last year and we can deliver that. We have our own workflow engine and can design it to do virtually anything a customer would want it to do. We’ve been offering hosting on the cloud going on four years even before people knew what the word ‘cloud’ was. Probably 85 percent of our customer base has on-premise servers. The hosting isn’t going like gang busters, but the option is there and we have picked up new customers that want that. We also have some customers that are hosting our application themselves.
How does that work?
Bailey: The software is designed to be multi tenant so they can put multiple customers on one installation and there’s a firewall between customers. At the same time it manages how many gigabytes each customer is using in each library in each department. And they can regulate the users for each customer so it’s kind of nice. It’s also the same product that goes on premise. What we’ve seen with some competitors is they have this hosted product that’s built for hosting, and if somebody wants it on premise it’s a different package. It looks a little different, feels a little different, but ours is the same package either way. When we’re showing a prospective dealer what we have, that’s one of the things we point out and one of the things they like to hear.
You also have your own capture software?
Bailey: That’s different than some other products on the market. We started in the capture business before we went into the document management business. We wrote our own capture management software, wrote our own barcode recognition software, we have our own PDF engine, everything in the product with the exception of the OCR engine, we wrote ourselves.
You have quite a few strategic partners, what makes a good one?
Bailey: A good partner example is Ricoh, and the main reason is that they brought us on as true partner of their business. Our product was in their product catalog and the pricing was in there so the dealers and branches could order any DocuLex product or service through the Ricoh catalog. They get all the credits they would if they ordered anything else from the catalog whether it was a copier or printer or a DocuLex product. The fact that we were an established partner in the price book separates us from a lot of companies. Another example of a strong strategic partner would be Sharp. Sharp actively recruits DocuLex for representation at their dealer events, has an entire program around promoting its partners to end users and always goes the extra mile to help its partners succeed through constant communications. Other manufacturers generally put a reference to you on their Website and you go to their shows but you’re still a separate entity. Ricoh and Sharp took it to the next level, which was bring us into the fold. We’ve been recertified for IKON and Ricoh now so we look forward to working with the new organization in the same capacity.
What types of customers are a good fit for Archive Studio?
Bailey: The beauty of our software suite is that it suits many different vertical markets. This is well-suited to the dealer channel as they want one product that works for everything. So basically if they’re selling to a local government today, some large dealers have reps for those verticals, but they don’t want to carry multiple document management products, they want to carry one, maybe two. So you kind of have to be all things to these industries. If I search our database of industries, we have government, healthcare, law firms, consulting companies, etc. Ernst & Young is a nice size customer of ours.
What’s the best way to engage the customer or prospect when first talking about the product?
Bailey: A lot of sales reps are opening up the conversation by asking the customer to talk about their business process improvements. The last year and a half there’s been more workflow-centric deals as opposed to ‘I want to get rid of storage space and go digital.’ More often than not when they want to automate a business process by improving workflow, that’s been a pretty good driver for the product with the dealers and a lot of reps. To me that’s more of a well-seeded customer who is going to be with us for a long time where they immediately see their process being automated versus somebody who just wants to scan documents to a folder or put documents in a document management system or combine them.
Another area that seems to be driving your business is e-mail archiving, which doesn’t involve paper at all.
Bailey: Our e-mail archive customers can be on premise with our service installed there or hosted. It doesn’t matter to us. Right now we’re supporting Microsoft Exchange users.
What can we expect to see from DocuLex in 2012?
Bailey: We’re working on Version 5 of Web search which takes us up a few notches in technology from a browser perspective. Internally we’re putting a pretty big emphasis on that. Although customers are quite happy with the V4 functionality, we know certain things about the browser platform we can offer so we’re working to provide current and future customers with the best in this technology. We will also continue to provide stellar support to current and future customers in the coming year, which definitely sets us apart from our competitors.
