Cloud Control: OfficeDrop Looks to Raise its Profile with Device Manufacturers

Healy Jones

Don’t look now, but the paperless office has arrived and it’s in large part thanks to cloud-based document storage solutions that the paperless office has grown in size and you can now access documents from wherever you want. One of the emerging players in the world of online storage is OfficeDrop, whose cloud filing cabinet allows users to digitize, sort, search, sync, print, and share documents and files.

OfficeDrop was founded in 2007 and its initial offerings launched in 2008, but as interest in cloud-based storage solutions has grown, the company is looking to raise its profile with device manufacturers.

OfficeDrop focuses primarily on small businesses looking to scan paper to the cloud and access those files from wherever they may be and from any device. Their sweet spot is companies with 1-25 employees, although they have customers with more than 100 employees as well. The company’s background is in document storage, so moving that to the cloud made perfect sense.

“Part of the reason we understand paper so well is that we were founded as a mail-in scanning service,” says Healy Jones, Vice President. “Back in the day, people would send us their paper documents, which OfficeDrop would individually scan to the cloud for each customer. We don’t do this anymore, but because we did, we understand the intricacies of what it means to handle and scan lots of important paper. Understanding this helped us effectively develop apps which are simple to use and allow customers to independently scan their documents to the cloud.”

An example of an OfficeDrop cloud folder.

Now they’re focusing on taking their message to the printer and scanner industry, licensing their platform to manufacturers, providing them with a suite of cloud offerings and to enhance services provided by their traditional output and scanning devices for a more mobile workforce. It’s estimated that nearly 60 percent of businesses will take to the cloud by the end of 2013 so this strategy is especially timely.

Manufacturers who align themselves with OfficeDrop will be able to distribute OfficeDrop’s cloud storage solution and smartphone scanning apps under their own brand.  By offering their cloud services, OfficeDrop contends that printer and scanner manufacturers can increase engagement with their customers, provide accessibility beyond the physical hardware, stay competitive in the market with a best of breed cloud storage feature, and build their brand name. Hardware vendors can skip the costly, time-consuming process of building a cloud storage platform (and mobile apps) from scratch and go right to capturing revenue and value with an integrated cloud offering.

OfficeDrop has a Windows desktop app that is essentially a sync client so a user can right click any folder and connect it to the cloud. They also have desktop scanning software that enables users to connect their scanners directly to the cloud. In addition, the company offers apps for iPhone, Android, iPad, and other phone and tablet apps, allowing device manufacturers and users to turn their phone into a scanner while also allowing them to access their files on the go.  There’s also a robust Web client that can be accessed by any Web browser anywhere in the world.

“These are all the major touch points where you would want to interact with your documents and files,” says Jones. “Because we came from the document background, we are better at handling scanned documents alongside traditional documents than anybody else out there. If you scan a document and put it into our cloud-filing cabinet, we not only make it viewable from any device, we also use OCR technology to make it fully text-searchable so you can search content by title and name, file type, and other metadata, like when it was last modified.”

Jones touts the app’s file search engine, particularly the update released the end of June. “Now you can get complicated with your search—you can search for files that contain the word ‘America’ and have the number 18 in the title that were modified last month and we’ll spit out the answers for you.”

This solution is particularly appealing to people creating scans but who don’t always take the time to give a title or name to that scan. “The fact that we’re doing the OCR and indexing the entire contents makes us very different than everybody else,” adds Jones.

End users can acquire the app for free via the Web or at different Web stores. However, the OEM or white label version of the product is something they expect the office technology industry will embrace, especially since they’ll be able to brand it as their own. “We can very quickly re-skin our entire product for any brand name that wants to offer it,” states Jones.

Unlike other document storage providers who maintain their brand, OfficeDrop’s attitude is that the OEM solution uses an already well-established brand that has a relationship with customers. OfficeDrop’s value proposition is to develop another revenue stream for that brand along with features that make their product more likely to sell.

“We also share the data and marketing, since this is a recurring relationship and we build a SaaS product and bill the customer every month,” explains Jones. “A lot of people are using the product every single day and together we can learn more about the customer to do a better job of servicing them.”

Right now, the partners or prospects that are picking up on this the fastest are full suite technology providers that offer not only the printing/scanning devices, but other devices such as computers or handsets. “What they’re trying to do is leverage their brand across all of the device’s touch points,” notes Jones. “Those are the people who seem to understand it the most right now. The others who are getting it are those with the better software and who understand how software helps with their device sales.”

One solutions provider that’s seen the potential in OfficeDrop is Nuance. “We can power PaperPort Anywhere, which is the cloud version of PaperPort,” explains Jones. “We built a desktop connector that connects the PaperPort desktop to PaperPort Anywhere that is powered by us as well and all the mobile apps that connect to it. You can use your mobile app to scan a contract and have it show up on your desktop in your PaperPort folder and vice versa, or you can scan on your PaperPort and have it show up on your iPad.”

That’s the OEM product where OfficeDrop works with a large brand to customize the cloud storage offering so it works well with the brand’s end customers – tweaking the feature set and pricing, then bundling it with whatever the brand is already distributing. The OfficeDrop cloud solution brand agnostic, which opens up plenty of opportunities for OfficeDrop.

“We’re targeting customers with large distribution selling hundreds of thousands or millions of devices a year,” notes Jones.

Besides Nuance, the company will be announcing a partnership with a major personal MFP manufacturer in the near future.

The Nuance partnership is an ideal match. “Nuance likes the fact that we’re so focused on handling scans,” says Jones. “Other providers don’t really do that. They don’t do scan searchable, online viewing or mobile viewing the way we do, or scanning from the phone the way we do it. We’re focused on paper, and PaperPort is obviously a paper-oriented product.”

As the interest in cloud storage grows, expect companies like OfficeDrop to grow right along with it. They currently have 140,000 users, up from 7,000 just a couple of years ago.

“The growth has been pretty ridiculous for us,” states Jones. “It seems like that’s proceeding aggressively. We’re getting a lot of engagement on the mobile app, as people are digitizing documents from devices or uploading files on their computer that they’re using on the go.”

Two verticals that have proven to be a good fit for the service is insurance and real estate investors where they may be off site and need access to paper.

“It’s nice to be able to pull out their phone and find a scan,” states Jones. “For that kind of on the go workflow, search and share is another feature we see people doing a lot on their mobile device. That’s driving the engagement and it’s also driving a lot of the growth. I think Nuance was surprised by how many new customers came to the PaperPort family from the iPhone. It’s proven to be a huge driver. People are searching for these solutions on their devices and are looking for ones that have high ratings, and they’re downloading them.”

He admits the company is somewhat surprised by how quickly the mobile workforce is driving everything. “Device makers who aren’t thinking about their mobile software are missing out,” cautions Jones. “This is the future of where small businesses are going to be interacting with their files. If you can’t scan to and print from a smartphone then your existing device sales are going to be in trouble.”

For now the biggest challenge revolves around growing at a 10 percent monthly clip. “Whenever the numbers start to get a little big, obviously distribution is something we’re constantly worrying about,” says Jones.

Adding the ability to accommodate more users is on the agenda. “People tend to think that with the cloud you can put more servers up,” states Jones. “It’s not that easy, your whole system has to be built to scale. You’re constantly finding different stress points as you add more users to the system; you are encountering problems you couldn’t have visualized until you get there. Growing the infrastructure is a lot of work. We make the necessary backend updates so users get the experience they deserve and the OEM partners don’t have to worry about scaling the system and servers.”

Hardware vendors can learn more about OfficeDrop’s OEM cloud storage offerings at www.officedrop.com/oem-cloud-storage