Abbyy Road

Independent software vendor Abbyy USA is hoping to leverage the channel to reach the small- and midsize-business markets and has created a new channel program to bring more solution providers into the fold.

The company has its roots in Russia, where in 1990 Abbyy Lingvo, an English/Russian dictionary, began what became an international document recognition, conversion and data capture software company. In 1997, Abbyy Ukraine opened its doors, and in 1999, Abbyy USA was launched in Fremont, Calif.

In the U.S., what began as a two-person operation now has about 40 employees and is looking to branch out and double its base of certified resellers from 30 to 60 within the next year.

Hot Factor: • Abbyy aims to double its base of certified resellers by next year. • New Accelerate Partner Program has three tiers • Company offers 40 percent margins in addition to tiered training

To help spur that growth, Abbyy launched the Accelerate Partner Program. The company does about 20 percent of its business through the channel but is aiming for 50 percent within three to four years.

"In the last couple of years we noticed that the small-business and midsize markets were growing and, at the same time, our hardware vendors were shipping a lot of document scanners to that market segment. We viewed this as an opportunity, and we think that there is a tremendous business chance to grow our revenue in that market," said Abbyy CEO Dean Tang.

"We looked at different scanner market segments and different corporation segments, and we came up with a three-step partner education program that's the crown jewel of the Accelerate Partner Program," said Tang.

THE COMPANY: ABBYY USA, DEAN TANG, CEO LOCATION: FREMONT, CALIF. FOCUS: DOCUMENT RECOGNITION, CONVERSION, DATA CAPTURE SOFTWARE.

The program has both Certified and Authorized reseller levels. The first tier is for lower-end imaging VARs, its Authorized resellers, which are looking for PDF solutions and interested in reselling its Abbyy PDF Transformer and FineReader software products.

The second tier is for Certified resellers targeting workgroup and department-level customers looking to buy higher-end scanners than small-business customers would. Products for this segment include Abbyy's Recognition Server and OCR SDK products.

Abbyy's third tier, for enterprise resellers, involves more extensive training on its products. Here, Abbyy calls in partners to help customers create higher-end enterprise solutions. "When they reach that level then we introduce our VAR to our OEM software partners like Kofax, EMC and ReSoft. They are in the enterprise solutions business and their solutions are $50,000 and above. That is where we hand off our VAR to work with our OEM customers," said Tang.

In addition to tiered training, Abbyy offers 40 percent margins with an additional 10 percent refund for resellers that sell $50,000 worth of software. If they reach that target, they also receive 10 percent back in the form of market development funds.

"We want to make sure that our partners make good profits by selling our products," said Tang. "The idea is that we want a VAR to be able to generate enough profit and to go to the market."