Channel Post speaks with Bernard de Fabribeckers, World Wide Sales Director at Iris about the challenges in the regional mobile scanner market and how the company intends to gain better footage in the region.
How is the market for portable scanner market growing in Middle East? What are the key factors driving the market?
The market size of portable scanners in Middle East is the third one after US and Europe and growth rate is a bit slower than in top two markets. The key drivers of this market are multiple and can be classified in two main types. The first one is the incredible demand for mobile devices in general while the other is linked to the software features that are developed and bundled with portable scanners.
What is the USP of your product offerings that have contributed to your growth in the region?
We have around 15 years of experience in mobile battery scanners and 30 years of experience in Arabic Optical character recognition, PDF creation and PDF App iOS & Android. Our long standing history clearly defines us as ‘the specialists’ in this market. Also, our products are especially built to answer ‘on the go’ needs and must be seen as a complementary approach to smartphone or tablet devices. Iris’ products are a clever, autonomous, stand-alone, high quality image standard that enables anyone on the go to grab documents and more importantly its content for further processing, sharing, archiving and retrieving needs.
What makes us stand apart is our experience in OCR technologies. When you combine this with our products’ capability to recognize Farsi or Arabic, we can confidently say that our portable scanners are the right answer to what this region needs in terms of information capturing ‘on the go’.
What challenges do you encounter in the region?
One of the biggest challenges we face is a resilient distribution network in the region and we are in pursuit to create a strong channel base across Middle East. Of course we do already have several serious partners in place but we are still in the starting phase where our brand, product and competitive advantages need to be better communicated to our customers. In addition to this, we believe that a local support service for our users needs to be in place to reinforce our image and reassure our customers. This asks for both time and budget that we are evaluating to address next year, in 2018.
What are the market opportunities available in the region and how do you enable your channel partners to capitalize on such opportunities?
As mentioned before, we are able to address multiple customer profiles ranging from the small office user up to large corporates looking to capture content to accelerate their business processes. Apart from this, our product range is also interesting for home businesses where optimization of filing or following up documents and expenses (simple invoice) for budget management is important.
Availability of opportunities can also be segmented in terms of vertical markets like education, legal, accountant, insurance and even health industry and we have identified that many players in these fields are looking for mobile solutions.
We enable our partners to capitalize on the opportunities is by explaining, demonstrating and showing them the multiple usage values our portable scanner range is able to offer. We believe our motto summarizes our goal very well: Less Paper, More Content.
What is in store for Iris in the near future?
The consumer market for mobile scanners and mobile app scanners will continue to grow fast and we will bring some very strong innovations for Corporate, Finance & Insurance, Healthcare, and logistics markets. In line with this we are going to make some very exciting announcements in September this year.
