Go, Granny, Go, With Goscan's Doc-Management Software

It makes sense that GoScan CEO Mike Stuhley understands solution providers so well: He used to be one. That's part of the reason why he's determined to make GoScan's solution so channel-friendly--in a hot market like document management, it pays to have all your bases covered.

GoScan software, which the company is currently offering through about 25 channel partners, is a vendor-agnostic, one-touch document-management solution that connects to any major database, Stuhley said, and is also compatible with any scanner to work for central or distributed scanning. The vendor is fond of saying it's "scanning software your grandmother can use." All that's required is entering a number of pages into a prompt and clicking a big green "Go" button.

"This isn't a new system they're buying," Stuhley insisted in an interview with VARBusiness. "It's an add-on to IBM, Microsoft, Oracle or whatever they have. It has to work with multiple platforms."

In 2003, Lake Forest, Calif.-based GoScan spun off from Formtran Inc., a provider of forms-processing systems, where Stuhley is also owner and CEO. Before Formtran, Stuhley was a vice president of Scantron, and a director at Cardiff.

GoScan was originally available only as an OEM product but in the past year was opened up to channel partners, where its reseller margins run as high as 50 percent.

The vendor offers several different commercial versions, with the Lite, scan-only version starting at $890, the desktop version (offering scan, bar code and connectors) at $2,750, the workgroup version (offering scan, bar code, full text optical character recognition, connectors and encryption, plus 100 users of GoScan Lite) at $9,875, and the enterprise version (everything, plus unlimited users of GoScan Lite) at $19,750. None of the GoScan versions operate on page-per-click.

GoScan is targeting the software not only at traditional document-imaging VARs but also--especially--Microsoft solution providers. GoScan has found a real sweet spot in the Microsoft environment, Stuhley said, especially since Microsoft doesn't offer scanning or indexing across its technology stack. With SharePoint, one of the fastest-growing offerings in the Microsoft ecosystem, Stuhley said GoScan, a Microsoft ISV, is best positioned to bank on that success.

"The question we keep hearing is: 'How do I get paper into SharePoint?'" Stuhley said. "We're talking to Microsoft customers who say, 'We know how to do SharePoint and Dynamics all day long, but we need a solution.' [VARs] resell the GoScan stuff to that customer. And it's really anywhere: Resellers want to be able to sell ... in multiple industries and multiple sizes."

Above all, Stuhley said, solution providers don't want to pitch something that sounds like "system overhaul" in a down economy.

"[VARs] don't want to sell a big capital expenditure product; they want to sell a small, low-cost, fast-sales-cycle add-on to what the customer already has," he explained. "And that's what this is."

"The big thing with GoScan, and what excited us the most is the bolt-on front end for Microsoft," said Dan Foster, president of Telstar Business Development Group, an Alpharetta, Ga.-based solution provider and GoScan VAR.

Foster said ease of use is one of GoScan's strongest selling points--and in some settings, such as document imaging in health-care environments, cost savings and ease of use are everything.

GoScan also offers its VARs free telemarketing--"When I was a reseller, I wanted leads!" Stuhley said--and uses only four SKUs.

"One thing you do see ... is how companies go in and out of love with the channel. I was always worried about where my business was going to go," Stuhley recalled. "I never want to be on the roller coaster whereby resellers don't hear a consistent business model from [vendors]."