A Year Ago: Siemens launches UK assault with ARCIS

Siemens Nixdorf (SNI) is pushing into the UK document management arena with a range of modular NT based software for archiving and imaging documents

The line of products is based around the ARCIS Windows NT-based system and will be marketed by a dedicated SNI team. ARCIS allows data to be captured, scanned and made searchable, or output to another medium. "Our track record with ARCIS in other markets in Europe and North America is outstanding [and] we have over 700 customers worldwide," said Mike Stroud, business development manager for application software at SNI, in a prepared statement.

Stroud said that the UK move was timely as the document management market showed signs of maturity. "The UK is the second largest IT market in Europe and we wanted to crank up our presence in Europe. Document management has jogged along quite nicely but it hasn't set the world on fire. All the analysts kept saying 199x was going to be the year of document management, but it never seemed to happen. Researching the market, we found some areas were slow, notably workflow, but some, like imaging and archiving were on the up, especially when tied to enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications."

A key strength of ARCIS is its integration with SAP's R/3 ERP software which allows archiving systems to incorporate both R/3-derived or non-R/3 documents. SNI will sell ARCIS for about £350 per user in the UK.

SNI has also inked a deal that will let Oce market ARCIS in tandem with its large format printers.

SNI aims to follow its UK software debut with more development tools later this year. The company has already been selling Comunity Visual Framework -- a Visual Basic-like tool -- since the beginning of this year and plans to follow up with TransView, middleware that competes with CA-Unicenter and Hewlett-Packard OpenView.

SNI said its software business is worth about $150m (£89.30m) worldwide.