Brian Bissett, in his most recent MFP Report newsletter, covered recent developments in MFP SDKs from HP, Canon and Sharp, as well as the eCopy SDK. In the article, he noted that there is a lot of advancement in MFP SDKs happening, but that there are some significant challenges ahead for ISVs in terms of writing to MFP platforms:
“Expensive MFP software development endeavors with multiple MFP partners and the need to navigate increasingly complex partner programs are together setting the stage for a financial survival-of-the-fittest battle among ISVs in the MFP world. The likely survivors will be among those early developers who’ve already achieved a critical mass of MFP software revenues across multiple vendors.”
This is troubling…especially as more and more ISVs and corporate developers seek to connect their applications with MFPs and other scanning devices in order to get the information that is trapped on paper into digital form and into their electronic workflows. One solution for them is to write to a document imaging platform such as eCopy ShareScan, allowing them to use a single platform to connect to any piece of hardware – regardless of device brand or type. This hardware agnostic approach is also far more aligned with end users organizations, which typically are not tied to a specific brand of MFP or scanning device.
As Brian also pointed out in his article, this approach has gained a lot of traction to date.
“Although eCopy is not an MFP vendor, its ShareScan software integrates with more third-party applications and has a greater user footprint than any specific MFP vendor has with its own software. In fact, it is quite possible that ShareScan has more connectors and market presence than all of the MFP vendors’ software platforms combined.”
Beyond the need to write to a single platform, I also covered some of the other factors that ISVs use in choosing a development partner in an earlier post. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on other factors as well.
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