One on One with Jeff Segarra of Nuance

Jeff Segarra is the Director of Product Management for the Imaging Division at Nuance Communications [1] where he leads the team that delivers the company's scanning and business productivity products [2]. We asked Jeff about his company and how it balances the different products it sells.

FCM: You do a lot of things including imaging, speech to text, health solutions and so forth. Do you keep these divisions separate or do they work in tandem?

JS: Nuance is made up of four divisions: (1) Enterprise, providing customer self service and call center applications, (2) mobility, command and control capabilities for mobile and consumer electronics, (3) healthcare, clinical documentation and dictation services, and (4) imaging, PDF conversion, scanning and document management products.

Automating business processes is a common theme that runs through nearly all of our solutions, across all of our divisions. It’s important to note, however, that our divisions only really work in tandem when a customer needs a solution from multiple divisions. Say, for example, that a customer wants to change an ECM research report that is on paper to audio in order to listen while driving. Nuance OmniPage [3] allows you to scan a paper document to Kindle and then Kindle transforms the document to audio using Nuance speech to text technology. There are many other ways our technologies work together to provide valuable offerings for our customers. This is just one example.

FCM: You've been making a lot of purchases lately. What is your long term strategy for the company?

JS: Our strategy is to continue to serve our customers with the most complete solutions possible. Acquisition can be a quick and cost effective option when it allows us to fill a gap in our offerings to better meet our customers’ needs. We consider carefully what the customer needs to be more productive or to save money and then we make a build or buy decision. Sometimes there are technologies available at a price that will work within our business model. Other times, it makes sense to develop the software ourselves.

FCM: What impact have the government Electronic Medical Records directives had on your business?

JS: As a result of the government’s directives, EMR opportunities for our document imaging products are beginning to present themselves. We are seeing more activity in this arena, especially in situations where the customer needs to extract data from paper documents for use in EMR systems. But the most significant impact for our company has been in the area speech recognition solutions for direct dictation into EMR. It all boils down to this: Physicians can speak faster than they can type. Speech to text solutions make doctors more productive, improve the quality of the EMR data and allow them to spend more time with patients.

FCM: What aspect of your business do you see having the most growth opportunities over time?

JS: One of the most promising growth opportunities within our imaging business is to offer sophisticated production capture technologies in products that are easy enough for the average office worker to use. Industry analysts agree that, today, less than 10 percent of office workers use document imaging technologies to automate their document workflows. It’s simply too difficult for the average office worker to use. On the other hand, centralized production capture departments have long used powerful tools to increase productivity, speed workflows and remove the drudgery that comes with processing paper. The key to tapping into this promising opportunity is to make these technologies simple and straight forward to use. Nuance is moving to take advantage of this opportunity.

FCM: There has been a lot of talk that ECM has been an abused term and some have called for document management to be moved into a separate category. Do you agree and does your company have its own DM solution?

JS: Although I understand why some would call for a new document management category, I believe that both document management and document imaging fit appropriately into the category of ECM. This is true even though the category continues to expand and change. There is a very wide continuum of document management software available as part of the ECM market--with varying capabilities, functionality and price points. We describe Nuance PaperPort [4] as document management software because our customers use it to manage paper and electronic documents. With PaperPort, we have chosen to offer powerful document imaging capabilities and lighter document management features, preferring instead to address more sophisticated document management needs through our connectivity to partner systems. The result is a product that hits the sweet spot for users working in a range of settings from home offices to the largest enterprises.