Version One Targets US Document Management Market

By David Roe | Published May 7, 2009

Something’s stirring in the UK document management industry. This time it comes in the form of Cheshire-based Version One (news, site) which has just announced that it is setting up shop in Florida to take on the US industry.

The move comes hot on the heels of recent figures that show the document and imaging software company has announced a rise in pre-tax profits of UK£ 1.2 million to UK£ 1.32 million to the end of March.

Spearheading the expansion will be Lynn Munns, general manager of Version One UK, who is moving stateside next month.

Gaps In US Market

Lynn Munns is to be replaced by Julian Bucks, an old hand in the IT industry. As Services and Support Director at COA Solutions — one of Version One’s biggest resellers — he is more than familiar with the huge range of products he will be managing from June.

Lynn Munns_Version One_2009.jpg
Lynn Munns; spearheading Version One's move into the US

Responding to the question as to why they are making the jump, Ms Munns said that the company had identified a gap in the US market that they are ideally suited to fill. “We have identified a gap in the American market for a document management software author with an end-to-end product offering and experience of integrating into financial systems,” she said.

“With our comprehensive product portfolio, integration capabilities and extensive experience of selling via the IT channel, the U.S.A provides us with considerable growth opportunities.”

With strong financial figures — and presumably industry confidence — behind them, the move is coming at an opportune moment.

AIIM 2009 Identifies Failings

Going back to the beginning of April this year, AIIM released its annual State of the ECM Industry report for 2009.

Some interesting and relevant figures in respect of Version One’s US venture jump out.

These include:

A staggering 47% of organizations managing electronic documents still posed a considerable challenge.
A further 55% of organizations had no confidence that important e-mails were retrievable or even recorded in the first place.
28% take more than a month to produce eDiscovery documents.

For a company that at the end of last year won a major award for its e-mail product alone, these findings should be sweet music.

In November, it was named E-mail Product of the Year 2008 (for the second year in a row) at the Document Manager (DM) Awards 2008. DbMail, an automated e-mail delivery service, was the product that helped win the award for Version One.

DbMail

Over 5,000 readers of Document Manager Magazine voted for the various products and had come to the overall conclusion that DbMail was the best in the category of e-mail products.

DbMail works with various accounting, manufacturing and ERP systems to enable organizations to automatically route e-mails containing documents like invoices, statements and contracts directly from in-house software systems.

In fact, it works in the very gaps that AIIM 2009 identified.

Continuing UK Development

Julian Bucks, as general manager at the UK end of the equation, will be focusing on growing the document management side of their UK business. Without continued growth and success in that market, he says, the US venture will be difficult.

Version One's document management and document imaging software enables automatic document scanning, recognition, storage, archiving, retrieval and delivery of all business documents. It integrates seamlessly into all major Accounting and ERP systems.

With the new offices opening early next month, it will be interesting to see how the US market takes to Version One.