Bill Bither's Insights

Today is exactly 4-months since Atalasoft become a Kofax company. Many of you have asked me how it’s going. The truth is it’s going very well and I’m learning a lot, but not without its challenges.

As General Manager, my job is to keep managing the business for growth and profitability. Even though our revenues are relatively small compared to the rest of Kofax, our growth rate and profitability is considerably higher which contributes positively to the ultimate goal of any public company – increase shareholder value.

In many acquisitions, integration into the business occurs very rapidly and deeply, causing many employees to leave in frustration. The plan for us was to do the opposite by keeping the business as independent as possible and integrating only critical back-end systems. Its working. So far we have kept all our employees, and actually have grown headcount by 3 since the acquisition. As in any business, the proof is in the numbers. I can’t be as transparent as we have been in the past, but will say that we have been knocking it out of the park, and intend on continuing this trend.

I’ve really enjoyed meeting the other Kofax colleagues throughout the world. These connections have enabled us to more quickly and efficiently expand to Europe. A few of us travelled to Las Vegas for an internal company kickoff where we were able to speak to other employees about Atalasoft and meet our Kofax colleagues. That event reaffirmed why I ultimately made the decision to be part of Kofax. It’s a lot of fun to be the worldwide leader in a business function as important as Capture. As a result of these connections we were able to quickly hire a new Developer Support Engineer and an Account Executive both located in Europe, enabling us to serve our EMEA partners much better.

Our development plans have accelerated as a result of this acquisition. We have been able to incorporate some amazing Kofax technology in an upcoming release of DotImage. We have never been more laser focused on Image-Enabling web portal applications. It’s always what we’ve done better than anyone, and it became crystal clear just how much room for growth and opportunity there is in this business.

As part of a public company, we must comply with SOX requirements which adds a fair amount of overhead to any process like approving invoices, ordering equipment, and accounting. It comes with the territory, but it’s hard not to find opportunities to improve. What excites me so much about B2B software are these very opportunities. The larger and more complex the company, the more opportunities there are to improve business processes whether it’s a simple email workflow process, or image-enabling your web portal application.