ScanSoft seeks VARs, developers

Speech and imaging systems vendor ScanSoft is seeking VARs for volume opportunities and to incorporate ScanSoft technology into other applications via software development kit licensing.

Derek Austin, corporate sales manager at ScanSoft, said the vendor was seeking resellers for its Dragon speech recognition and Portable Document Format (PDF) conversion-related applications.

"We want more VARs," he said. "I'd like to get half a dozen people in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne."

The whole of Australia was being covered but ScanSoft wanted to boost those three centres, he added.

The global market for different kinds of PDF creation, conversion and other applications was growing at around 15 percent and organisations were showing increasing interest, Austin said.

"We think desktop PDF is about 86 percent of that opportunity," he added. "Adobe has been excellent in establishing a standard and getting it going, but things are now opening up."

ScanSoft had its own PDF-making application, called PDF Create, that it believed was particularly suited to business use, he said.

 But Austin said the biggest VAR opportunities were with PDF Converter, which converts PDF files into Microsoft Word documents and forms, with text, columns, tables and graphics.

ScanSoft OmniPage and PaperPort document conversion applications could also be profitably sold by resellers. "High end versions now include enterprise features like integration with Microsoft SharePoint [for instance]," he said.

Meanwhile, speech recognition software by Dragon -- which offers its own application programming interfaces (APIs) -- was also becoming more popular in businesses, he said.

"We'd like to see more VARs bundle these with other solutions," Austin said.

He said ScanSoft's biggest business was in selling a technology -- through software development kit licensing -- for incorporation with other applications. However, Austen wouldn't give any sales figures.

The big metropolitan centres in Australia still had more of a "box-pushing" mentality, he added.

ScanSoft had a "straightforward" VAR program that could be accessed online via a page at http://www.channelmanagers.com.au, he said.