Nuance buys eCopy

Nuance announced this week that they were purchasing eCopy, a network scanning company, for $54 million in what seems to be a perfect fit for Nuance's growing document capture business. Nuance is increasingly becoming the key player for scanning, faxing, printing and OCR (optical character recognition). While this only represents a part of the content management business, they are taking steps to ensure they cover nearly every aspect of the niche.

According to the press release, Nuance bought eCopy to provide multifunction printer (MFP) functionality from the desktop to the network:

"The acquisition of eCopy combines Nuance's multifunction printer (MFP) desktop solutions and eCopy’s server offerings to deliver network scanning solutions that connect the widest range of MFPs to a broad set of business applications and content management systems."

For eCopy CEO Edward Schmid, it seemed a perfect fit. "The MFP industry is poised to benefit greatly from our mutual focus on delivering integrated solutions that solve real business problems for customers."

eCopy gives Nuance customers connectors to more than 100 enterprise applications including such popular content management offerings as Microsoft SharePoint and EMC Documentum, as well as other enterprise applications like SAP and Oracle. The combined company gives Nuance a foot hold to touch many major enterprise applications--which is no small feat.

For more information:
- see the Nuance press release [1]