One on One with Darren Knipp of Perceptive Software

Darren Knipp is CTO at Perceptive Software, where he is responsible for product strategy, establishing the company's product and technical vision while leading all aspects of the software development processes. Perceptive was recently purchased by Lexmark. We asked him about the sale and how Perceptive will fit in at the new, larger organization.

FCM: Where will Perceptive fit into the Lexmark family?

DK: We're an independent company within the Lexmark organization. The leadership teams at both companies understand the challenges associated with a hardware vendor acquiring a software maker, and they addressed that reality by keeping Perceptive Software an independent, stand-alone entity. Perceptive rounds out Lexmark's full ECM capabilities. If we think of content in the context of a business process, Lexmark can now offer customers the ability to robustly process, collaborate on and protect their content, in addition to capture and output.

FCM: What prompted you to sell to larger organization?

DK: I'll start by saying that the acquisition is all about growth--Perceptive's growth and Lexmark's growth. Lexmark will definitely help us build upon and strengthen our industry-focused solutions. Also, Lexmark saw Perceptive Software as a best-in-breed provider, and they want us to keep doing what we're doing. Lexmark will accelerate Perceptive's growth, using their global infrastructure and sales channels. Today, about ninety percent of Perceptive's business is in the United States, and we see a significant global expansion opportunity, particularly in Western Europe, where Lexmark is already well established and where we can leverage the sales infrastructure. Lastly, Perceptive has a strong core of development resources, software sales resources and software management resources. We are leveraging Lexmark's strength to help us develop and deliver more world-class ECM solutions faster.

FCM: What impact do you foresee this having on the organization going from a small local company to a larger national one?

DK: We don't see ourselves as a local company. Over the last several years Perceptive Software has enjoyed a compound annual growth rate of around forty percent. More than 2,500 organizations in 30 countries rely on Perceptive Software to enhance and simplify their business processes. The acquisition offers growth through the connection with Lexmark enterprise accounts. Lexmark will also help Perceptive accelerate international expansion with particular emphasis in Western Europe.

FCM: I see you as a document management solution. Where do you see yourself fitting in on the enterprise content management spectrum?

DK: While industry definitions of enterprise content management vary a bit, Perceptive Software fits squarely into the ECM vendor category. We develop, sell, deploy and support document imaging, document management, workflow, eForms and RIM software products. In addition to these core ECM products, we offer analytics, OCR, digital signatures and a variety of products that let users access content directly from SharePoint, MS Office and ESRI. We also allow users to introduce content directly into workflows via numerous MFPs. Additionally, we provide collaboration native in our product which is augmented through our integration with Microsoft SharePoint, as an example. We also offer WCM in partnership with SDL Tridion. All of these offerings add up to our being recognized as the fastest growing ECM vendor among the top 10 global providers according to Gartner.

FCM: Do you think the industry is ready for records management in the cloud? Do you have plans for any products that store information in the cloud?

DK: Perceptive currently offers four deployment options for all of our solutions, SaaS being one of the four. All of the deployment options we provide are currently used by our customers. As for the industry being ready for RIM in the cloud, the short answer is, yes. While data security is a lingering concern, SaaS applications reduce risk on a variety of fronts. Assuming the customer is hosted by a high quality provider, the data center in which their environment resides is likely much more secure than if the system were hosted on the customer's premises.

Many organizations simply can't afford to operate a SAS-70 rated data center (as Perceptive Software does), which provides high availability and scalability. I'll add that we see the industry in a state of transition. Many customers have SaaS applications in addition to applications hosted on premises. Therefore, ECM integration needs often span both types of applications. Our rich integration offerings-from patented approaches to standard web services-enable us to bring value to our customers that other ECM systems can't duplicate.

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