Friday 21st March, 2014

In some of the best partnerships it's sometimes difficult to see where one ends and other begins. They complement each other so much that the fit almost seems obvious. Of course the easy compatibility often masks months and sometimes years of careful negotiation. And so it is between ABBYY and their UK based gold partner Invu, who are the largest reseller of the ABBYY Flexi Capture product. Interested to hear a bit more about Invu and their relationship with ABBYY, I caught up with their CTO, Stuart Evans at the recent eWorld conference in Westminster.

Usually when I arrange to meet a solution provider, it's either someone related to the marketing side of the business, the CEO or founder - not normally the CTO. So I was prepared for a thorough, if perhaps a little dry rendition of the merits of the product. But life often has a way of making you question your easy assumptions, and as I got talking, as you'd expect - yes he knew his product inside out - but carried with it an interesting and infectious enthusiasm. Stuart has over 11 years in the industry, 7 of them with Invu with the gold partnership with ABBYY being established towards the tail end of 2012.

Invu isn't unique in offering what most solution providers are hoping to deliver - cost efficiencies, greater control and visibility - all of which it does well. But as Stuart explained, what makes it different is the easy to use U.I combined with a solution which is designed to flex around their customers in a very cost effective way. Aimed primarily at the mid-market, the company together with ABBYY have successfully led a large number of organisations down the path to automation - firstly by making sure that the quality of the data at the front end is error free, then routing the captured information, via designated codes and workflowing through to relevant approvers and settlement.

Then if organisations add the POP (Purchase Order Processing) element to their solution, organisations are able to benefit from greater visibility and reporting across the whole purchase to pay route. With POP, buyers are able to benefit from enhanced search results - in other words, to see what others have bought in the comapny and to use that data, which of course reduces associated admin time and cost - while again making the whole process transparent. As Stuart says - if you make something easy, people just take to it, quoting the company mantra "if they can shop at home, they can POP at work."

Here's a YouTube clip of Stuart at eWorld: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPIveMjmBJE