Positioning the ISIS Papyrus Platform

When we announced the ISIS Papyrus Platform in 2000 we were way ahead of times. When we shipped and installed it the first time in 2001 we still were. It is now 2008 and we are still ahead. Does that make our life easier? Absolutely not. We always have to prepare the market for the new solutions and others cash in on it as well. But we rather do that then being a copycat.

The ISIS Papyrus Platform suffers from not fitting into the artificial market fragments created by analysts. If a product has no direct competitor then it will not be covered, as one vendor does not make a marketplace. Analysts also find it difficult to change a previous assessment and to accept that single product might exhibit leading functionality in multiple market segments.

Already in 2001, ISIS Papyrus announced its Inbound/Outbound Process strategy and started to promote the forgotten contextual link between business process and all business content. Only few customers and analysts were ready to look further than the tip of their nose. Today’s problems of ECM, CRM and BPM are centered in a lack of understanding the business context - how people and business processes are related to content. It is in fact impossible to determine the business context for all of the unstructured information within your organization as long as it is treated independently. Both a process that does not deal with content and content that does not relate to a process are irrelevant for business.
What is the ISIS Papyrus Platform?
The Papyrus Platform is an end-to-end, process- and content driven application lifecycle system from business need to production. The ISIS Papyrus Platform offers a unique combination of application features as well as the system management power to scale on an enterprise level to thousands of users. By setting up Papyrus WebRepository loaded with metadata, templates and tool components, IT enables business users to define applications that tie business processes, content and service interfaces together without the need for complex projects.

Being Ahead is not always good!

Innovative and future oriented software vendors face tough times today. ISIS Papyrus has always been on the forefront and quite ahead of times. I always proposed for example that a standard electronic format had to be at the center of any enterprise document product long before PDF came into the market.

I remember that even when we could print to all major printers, our competition would go out and claim that having AFP as a core architecture was a drawback of our the ISIS Papyprus prodcuts. And yes, some businesses believed that and went with the competition. Don’t get me wrong, I am not moaning about the fact that IT vendors lie in their marketing and sales process. Competition is good and has always forced us to do better. There are those that make the most unbelievable claims and they are still believed. One vendor claimed that because we supported AFP we were a mainframe product adpated for PC and therefore so slow, when everyone knows that the opposite is the case. IBM keeps telling us that we are the ONE VENDOR that has by the largest C++ compilations for z/OS and z/Linux. Papyrus formatting is only slower when you compare it to products with a lot less functionality and flexibility.

Take for example Transpromo! This sudden hyped up buzzword can really make me mad. We did our very first TRANSPROMO project with dynamic marketing messaging into bank statements for Citibank in Singapore in 1996 in mixed English and Chinese. We do transpromo better than anyone else in black and white, spot color and full color printing.

We at ISIS Papyrus have never taken the short cut. We still do not raise our prices so high that we can discount to 50% and make an ignorant purchasing clerk look good. It is simply not good business.

And that is all we do at ISIS - Win for you and Win for us!