Forrester Research rates Papyrus a ‘Strong Performer’!

I this post I want to comment a bit more on ‘The Forrester Wave – Document Output for Customer Communications Management’.

Overall, Analysts Sheri McLeish and Craig Le Clair set a fairly high goal to analyze the current market offering in document output management. Only vendors with enterprise class functionality in interactive, on-demand and structured document creation were analysed. The ISIS Papyrus Platform was positioned as a strong performer in the same league as all the large vendors. No overall leader emerged.

“ISIS Papyrus by far owns the broadest vision for DOCCM in the industry,” stated The Forrester Wave™: Document Output For Customer Communications Management (DOCCM), Q2 2009. Forrester defines DOCCM as software used to compose, format, personalize and distribute content to support physical and electronic customer communications and improve the customer experience.

The ISIS Papyrus Platform v7 was reviewed in The Forrester WaveTM as follows: “ISIS scored well as a Strong Performer across all segments and as a well-balanced product with enterprise potential. ISIS Papyrus has the broadest and most unique vision for DOCCM in the industry, supporting ECM, CRM, analytics, event processing, and BPM. It has a modular and easy-to-configure system based on patented technology that combines with innovative post composition, output management, and production management.”

Forrester also reviewed reference installations and stated: “Customers are committed to the ISIS vision and feel passionate about this vendor.”

I am pretty satisfied with the report but it obviously is highly subjective how the functionality, strategy and market presence is rated. If you purchase the report you can change the weightings in the spreadsheet to find your own leader. What comes out of these reports has a lot to do with how clever the vendor positiones features in relationship to buzzwords and trends at the analyst firm. As Papyrus is always against the current trend we usually do not too well in such reports except when a more detailed comparison and an in-depth evalutaion of long term benefits is made. Butler Group did that excellently.

Also at Forrester marketshare and business size is still number one. Therefore a fairly weak strategy and little innovation goes a long way with a huge vendor. A smaller vendor who is very innovative is seen at risk because of that. So you cannot expect that small innovative businesses are at the forefront in terms of ratings, except if once again you hit one of the buzzwords that matches the analysts predictions! There is kind of a commonality between IT and stock market analysts and it is related to self-fulfilling prophecies.

I noticed a lack of understanding in what the various product functions actually are supposed to do. The true complexity of structured output functionality was underrated with fairly basic documents being considered as the norm. For interactive output Forrester mostly rated forms filling applications that in most cases are not enough for the most basic requirements. The document generation with such vendors is then always additional hardcoding in Java or similar. OnDemand generation is defined as document request from other application and widely underestimates the need for interactive text editing as well. Do not forget that you also need the ability to collate, bundle, sort and resend those documents either on paper and electronically and that this ability is neatly integrated with the Papyrus Platform.

What Forrester considered as being ‘Workflow’ or ‘process’ for document application cannot really be taken into account. Only the large BPM setups of either EMC or Oracle would come close to what customers are asking and getting today from a Papyrus Platform. What Papyrus EYE offers in terms of GUI not even Adobe FLEX can come close, but how would Forrester understand that? Therefore if you need highly user-customizable content, free-text editing, dynamic processes for creation and production, powerful color charts, image and graphics you better make sure that you do a proof of concept before signing a contract.

Papyrus Platform for ADF

Two studies covered the ISIS Papyrus Platform recently for its ADF Automated Document Factory functionality. One was ‘The Gartner MarketScope for Automated Document Factory 2.0 Software’ which is available on http://www.gartner.com. The other one is  ‘Innovation in Automated Document Process Management’ from Strategy Partners, the European leader in market research and strategy consultancy for Enterprise Content Management and Output Management.

The Strategy Partner study fully agreed on one point with Gartner Group: “All the elements of the ADF 2.0 can be covered with ISIS Papyrus.”

The two studies differ substantially in scope and quality. Strategy Partner report author Oscar Dubbeldam said, “Innovation in Automated Document Process Management is certainly not a traditional market research report in which several vendors are compared. It encompasses an in-depth study of vendor products and gives a lot of practical advices to organizations who need to transform their current print and mail activities at a more strategic level.” I agree.

The Gartner Group Study obviously rates company size as more relevant than software functionality and innovation. The Papyrus functionality was rated as ‘positive’ but then so were most other vendors, except the hardware vendors who received better ratings. The report completely missed one essential point which it sort of plays down or ignores: ISIS Papyrus is the only non-hardware vendor who fully supports all modules of ADF 2.0. The report states that we do support them, but missed the fact that we do also support all major hardware, printer vendors, operating systems and databases and therefore make the user of the Papyrus Platform for ADF independent of HW or OS prerequisites. Try that with one of the HW vendors?

Gartner points to our lack of size in the US and sort of questions our ability to perform remote support. If they would not see it as a drawback they would not mention it. I am disappointed because I explained our powerful remote support concept and technology in person to the author Pete Basiliere. Consider this: The three largest outsourcers in the US – First Data Resources, TSYS and Personix – produce together approximately half the American credit card issues ALL with Papyrus. Would we not be able to give them the support they need, we would not be their NUMBER ONE document output vendor. Papyrus is that easy to implement AND support! If a vendor has a large service unit, I propose that this is so because his solution is rather complex!!!

To my very positive surprise Strategy Partners went a lot deeper into functionality than Gartner. They identified Papyrus’ leadership in “workflow capabilities that are extremely flexible and can incorporate any type of activity, ranging from print, e-mail, web delivery and archive including auditing for compliance” and stated further that “normalization of multiple different formatted data streams as it is non-intrusive and does not need pre-data processing.” Some more Papyrus highlights from the Strategy Partners report:

• GUI for the operators can be structured in many different views
• Auditing and logging of actions and tasks can be done at any level
• Multi-channel delivery capabilities
• Postal optimization capabilities
• Configuration of new applications speeds deployment rapidly

Strategy Partners did not miss much but they obviously focused on the ADF capability. Therefore the UTA User Trained Agent and the very powerful RIA capability of Papyrus EYE for the Web, just get cursory mention.

After the very positive report about ISIS Papyrus in the Madison Advisors Transpromo Study, it seems that we are finally getting the attention we should be getting.

Both studies are certainly worth reading if you are planning on making decisions for document automation so please go out to those analysts websites to buy them online.