Company : Customers : Perceptive

Perceptive
More Sales via More Database Support

Goal:

Increase market for sales by supporting interconnectivity with a multitude of databases.

Why they Select DataDirect:

DataDirect data providers deliver complete support for multiple database back ends, ease of deployment, and great support.

Business Benefits:

Perceptive can now offer its solutions across a multitude of operating system and database platforms, making them attractive to a much wider market.

Technical Benefits:

Embedding DataDirect drivers dramatically reduced development time to market for the ImageNow solutions, as well as the time Perceptive's technicians spend on deployment.

Roadblock to Sales

Prior to 2005, Perceptive Software, Inc. found itself in a frustrating position. The software company knew it had a winning product — ImageNow — and a very wide market for the type of document and workflow management provided by the various ImageNow-based solutions they offered. But sales were encountering roadblocks due to the product's lack of support for other products deployed in the IT environments of many organizations they'd approach — particularly for database platforms.

"People would tell us that they really liked our product," recalls Jessie Armstrong, Sr. Product Manager at Perceptive. "But they'd have a corporate mandate that they could only use, say, Oracle as their back-end. Since our product used only its own embedded database, we'd have to tell them ''sorry.'"

This didn't sit well for a number of reasons. Most important, of course, was the loss of potential sales opportunities. But in addition, one major selling point for Perceptive's software is its ability to integrate with existing software solutions and to leverage its customers' existing technology investments.

"We integrate with every accounting system out there," says Armstrong. "You can click a button in your accounting system to view all the paperwork our system has allowed you to scan in."

A Great Diversity of Users and Platforms

With an ability to scale for customers having anywhere from 5 to 5,000+ users, Perceptive's innovative solutions are used by organizations in a broad range of industries worldwide. Accounting departments in any type of businesses use it to manage the entire invoice approval process, routing scanned-in invoices according to a company-defined workflow. Financial aid and higher education organizations use it for scanning students' applications for aid, tax returns, etc. Healthcare organizations use it for filing scanned-in admissions and sharing patient information with insurance payers and other healthcare providers.

Major users of ImageNow solutions are as far-ranging as Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, CareerBuilder.com, CitiGroup, Home Shopping Network, and many governnent organizations as well as many major healthcare providers and universities. As can be imagined, such diversity of users involves a multitude of different IT platform preferences and standards.

"Our application layer has always supported multiple platforms," says Armstrong. "We have this little grid that shows the versions of operating systems we support for the application server; we determined to include databases in that grid and to have a check in every one of them. Our goal was to never have to lose sales because we couldn't support someone's database platform."

How Will We Ever Do It?

At first the development team at Perceptive considered writing natively to every database, using the client software for Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and so on. But that approach would have resulted in a very long and drawn-out time to market. And then there was the support of different database versions to consider.

"One of our biggest concerns was "How are we ever going to support all that?" Armstrong recalls. "Every time a customer would go out and download the latest version of, let's say, the DB2 driver, we'd run the risk of something not working. At the time, we were only about 45 employees in all. So as soon as we heard about a product like DataDirect's, that other option quickly lost appeal."

Armstrong says that embedding DataDirect drivers into the ImageNow product offered a threefold benefit:

• Complete and up-to-date support for multiple database back ends.
  
  
• Ease of deployment. "To install an Oracle client, for example, is a nightmare," says Armstrong. "It takes forever. To install DataDirect drivers takes us a matter of seconds. It dramatically cuts back on the time that members our professional service team spend on onsite deployment."
  
  
• Excellent support. "The product's been stable enough that we haven't really needed to call DataDirect support much," Armstrong says. "But when we have, it's been just superb."

Supporting Growth

By embedding the DataDirect drivers in the ImageNow software, Perceptive was able to add support for SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2 all in one shot, shaving many months off the product's time to market. Armstrong reports that the entire process, including rebranding the drivers, took about six months total.

"We like that we sell the DataDirect technology as just part of our software," Armstrong says. "Even many members of our internal support and deployment staff don't know that we don't write those drivers. And our sales staff loves that they can silence that one techie in every sales situation who always says 'You won't support this,' with 'Yes, we do.'"

In the three and a half years or so since that time, Perceptive has grown from 45 to 380 employees and its revenue has increased approximately tenfold.

"As you can imagine, growing that fast and supporting that many customers is a tremendous challenge," says Armstrong. "But even with bringing in all those new customers, we've never had any database-related issues in that time."

While Armstrong attributes this galloping growth to combination of several initiatives within the company, he credits DataDirect with having had a considerable role in it.

"Without question, the cross-platform capabilities and ease of support have contributed to Perceptive's success," he concludes. "Our product's acceptance in the industry has been phenomenal."