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Software Success Story

Software Developer Success Story

Software Success Story: Abbyy USA

Dean Tang founded Abbyy USA after his previous company, Newsoft now a subsidiary of UMAX, went public in Taiwan. Abbyy USA was founded 5 years ago and is a fully owned subsidiary of Abbyy Software, a large software development firm in Russia specializing in artificial intelligence in the language field. Abbyy has been active in the industry for 15 years.

Abby Software has been marketing online since 1999, effectively using permission based e-mail marketing, banner advertising, and popup ads to sell their software. Abbyy's unique fundamental strength is their core technology. Abbyy has made every attempt to understand the needs of the customer and develop a product or technology that meets their needs.

The company itself is fairly technology-centric, specializing in the area of artificial intelligence in the field of language, field processing (form reading), machine print, hand print, and flexible capture. In 2004 Abbyy's Flexicapture tool won the 2004 Best of Show award at AIIM a popular document management trade show.

Abbyy often licenses their technology to other developers to address vertical market needs. Companies like Kurzweil use Abbyy's software to assist blind people in scanning news and articles.

In addition Abbyy has a number of OEM relationships with hardware manufacturers like Epson, Dell and Acer. The hardware companies often sell scanners. The hardware manufacturers realize the need for software to process the documents and convert the documents to different formats. Abbyy is able to provide an OEM solution that satisfies those needs. At the heart of negotiations is Abbyy's belief that an educated consumer that understands the power of technology will look for additional capturing and document conversion solutions in a business environment.

Abbyy has assembled a great group of employees, and they hire people that fit the company they want to build. They are self-disciplined and self motivated creating a culture to support the goals behind Abbyy. Abbyy USA currently has 27 employees, due to technological tools and improved infrastructure they have increased their productivity. Abbyy uses an enterprise contact management system to track customer contact. It is their core belief that every phone call to Abbyy, every e-mail, every customer visit, every face to face visit gives them an opportunity to understand market situation and needs. The enterprise contact management system gives Abbyy the ability to store and retrieve the information gleaned from customer interaction.

Abbyy's advice to developers is to, identify potential needs and determine why clients need a specific technology, when negotiating contracts consider how important a solution is, analyze customer needs, and be fair, OEM licensing is a long term business, look at negotiations with a long term perspective. And finally pick the right partners solid, good product, good technology, give a little up to build trust , this will make renewal continuance much easier.