The IRIS Group – no, not the UK-based one but the Brussels Euronext-quoted outfit that last week bought Morningstar – has made another acquisition. This time is a Docutec, a German-based developer of invoice recognition and document classification systems. The full name of this IRIS business is Image Recognition Integrated Systems Group SA and last year the group achieved sales of 81 million euros and now it appears to be embarking on a world domination strategy. Could Etienne Van de Kerckhove, the CEO of IRIS, be set to become the most famous Belgian today (other than Tintin obviously)?
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Friday, November 30
If it's Friday, it must be another IRIS acquisition
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 30 Nov 2007 11:27 GMT
Monday, November 26
Guest opinion: Gerard Tilley of FAST Ltd
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 26 Nov 2007 10:46 GMT
Are you throwing money away – the real cost of software licensing
by Gerard Tilley* Does the colour drain from the face of your firm's IT director each time the words software compliance are mentioned? Recent government changes have pushed the matter far higher up the agenda and now the legal repercussions of not having your software licenses completely in order are greater than ever. But the legal implications are just the tip of the iceberg and more and more firms are recognising the financial benefits that can be gained from getting their software licensing in order. We've spent years working with law firms in fact 81 of our current members are solicitors or law firms and 30 of these are in the top 240 practices. But these days an increasing amount of our work is to help these firms optimise their investment in IT assets and avoid overspending on software licensing, rather than simply helping them 'get legal' so to speak. So what steps do you need to take to get the cost saving ball rolling? Is it all about Software Asset Management and making sure that you're not paying for licenses you don't need? Partly, yes, and we'll come back to this topic in more detail a little later, but there are other methods that can be put into place in order to ensure that you are spending and saving wisely. Employee productivity is a key area that can be addressed fairly easily and quickly by deploying a structured policy on what is and isn't acceptable activity on the firm's network. A study by PandaLabs recently revealed that almost 40% of internet browsing at work is personal. Personal use of the internet accounts for almost an hour of employees' time every day which, in 2005 resulted in losses over £200 billion. Add to this the fact that 21% of mail received by companies is spam and 5% of all Internet traffic is infected with malware, the average annual loss to a company can be anything up to £91,630. The survey went on to reveal that the average annual cost of computer attacks on companies without adequate security devices has soared due to productivity loss, bandwidth consumption and time dedicated by IT staff to cleaning the network. What most of the firms we work with seem to have in common is the fact that their email and internet usage policies are either well and truly out of date or not clear enough. Some recent work we did with Lincoln-based Sills & Betteridge has seen the firm develop controls which ensure they know that everyone is complying with the law. Its vital your staff have a clear set of boundaries of what they are permitted to do on their work network and the implications of downloading any illegal material such as music, games and pornography, but also any unlicensed software that would permit them to download such material in the first place. The flip side to this coin is that if you don’t set limits on what you permit your staff to use the internet for at work, you will undoubtedly be hampering the performance of your network and many firms are unaware of how much is over invested in expanding their data storage simply to accommodate for personal storage of films, music and other downloadable material. Furthermore, money spent on IT security products needs to be measured – the only way to know if the investment has been money well spent is to do a full network audit to check what is still getting through. As I referred to earlier, better Software Asset Management is fundamental to saving your firm money. Carrying out a SAM assessment in your workplace will almost always reveal that you are over investing in areas where you could be making big savings. FAST Ltd carried out a study which revealed that 41% of UK businesses admitted to wasting thousands of pounds through over-licensing. For example, you may have Microsoft Office installed on every PC in your workplace, but do all your staff use all the applications included in the package? The answer is, probably not. So you might benefit from introducing metering to monitor exactly how much you use each licensed application. This will doubtless put you in a much better position for negotiations with re-sellers when the time comes to either upgrade your existing packages or in the purchase of new software programmes. From experience we understand that one of the key areas of concern for law firms is ensuring they're handling their software licensing projects adequately. By bringing in an external, independent body to assist with the project, you should expect to be working with an organisation that can:– • Proactively advise you if your circumstances change on the implication to your software licensing, specifically where Volume License agreements may need to be upgraded or downgraded • Assist with Software Licence Agreement negotiations to ensure that the licensing terms and conditions are well understood and the most appropriate level of contract is applied • Offer specialist guidance on potential savings and the key issues surrounding virtualisation licensing • Offer specialist advice and guidance around the complexities of licensing, including Microsoft licence agreements with regards to Select -v- Enterprise, per processor -v- Client Access Licence (CAL), device -v- user. Being able to get this sort of advice from an independent body and not from a company associated with any particular software is obviously the best way forward as businesses regardless of sector are being led by publishers and resellers. They are, at the end of the day, there to sell software and if you can not give them accurate information on your requirements, they will not be able to meet those requirements. But if you can portray yourself as being entirely knowledgeable of what you're looking for, their job is inevitably going to be more straightforward with less potential to overlicense your software – great news for you since you come away content that you've only spent what you really needed to, with no nasty surprises later in the day. So while many firms take compliance seriously and are open to taking advice from organisations like FAST, ironically the real cost of compliance, as perhaps you're starting to see, is far more compelling and there is a big percentage of companies out there who are yet to benefit from the savings readily available to them. The fact that their actions will also make them 100% software compliant would, I'm sure, not be lost on the legal sector. But perhaps the biggest issue facing small to medium legal firms, is that if you're the one responsible for ensuring software compliance in the workplace, chances are you are also a fee-earner. And perhaps you’re not too sure about making key decisions without expert guidance, so its vital that you take action and enlist the expertise of someone who can help you become more educated, knowledgeable and empowered and to ensure that when you have your software purchasing hat on, your are spending with the aim of improving your businesses processes rather than simply throwing money away on software licenses. While implementing an effective asset management strategy will initially involve some investment, organisations that do take such action will realise savings of between 5 and 35% of their IT budgets (Gartner Group). And according to Compass, for every £1 invested in software asset management processes, you will likely see a return on investment of £5-£10 – definitely not to be sniffed at. So the message for those of us who work in the legal sector is that although the basic premise of software asset management is one of compliance there are significant cost savings that can be made. For practices large and small partners should be more than amenable to this sort of message – getting your software house in order and saving money is at the end of the day a highly attractive proposition. However there is one all too overlooked aspect to this and that is one of credibility. Making sure your licenses are in order is surely at the heart of the compliance message – after all how can you work in the law and simply ignore it through nothing more than the effort factor in getting your software house in order. • Gerard Tilley is the managing director of FAST Limited Friday, November 23
Morningstar Systems purchased by IRIS Group
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 23 Nov 2007 17:04 GMT
Morningstar Systems, specialist in the
field of context management and enterprise content management,
has announced that 100% of its shares have been purchased by the Euronext-listed IRIS Group. 'No' this is not the same UK-based IRIS Group that now owns the AIM, Laserform, Mountain and Videss businesses but a European operation probably best known for scanning, OCR and electronic document management technology.
René Beulen, the sales manager at Morningstar said "We very strongly believe that IRIS and Morningstar have a lot of synergies. For instance Morningstar will help IRIS in proposing integrated solutions towards the ECM market, and IRIS will bring their experience in large document recognition projects as well as in implementing complex IT infrastructure." Founded in 2001, Morningstar Systems is probably best known as a reseller and implementer of the Interwoven DMS within the Benelux region. More recently Morningstar also became a reseller of the Bighand digital dictation, Metastorn BPM and the InterAction CRM systems. It is also an OpenText DMS partner. Monday, November 19
Guest article - Rupert White on Making plans for Iris
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 19 Nov 2007 11:12 GMT
This is a guest article by Rupert White of the Law Society's Gazette...
Arlene Adams, new chief of the legal arm of Iris Software, spoke to Rupert White of the Law Society's Gazette about the company's plans for the future. The market is ripe for a company such as Iris, she says, and she wants to put the uncertainty that surrounded the buyouts of the CS Group era behind the new firm and move on with plans that could boost the fortunes of thousands of law firms. Iris Software Group is the new name of the company that includes Computer Software Group (CS Group). CS Group is the company that bought legal IT companies AIM, Mountain, Videss and Laserform in 2006 & 2007. Iris now has 4,000 law firm clients in the UK, making it the biggest single player in the game. How it will keep them, and what it does next, is therefore near the top of quite a few managing partners' agendas. Iris's rise to power has not come smoothly – customers and rivals alike have voiced fears about whether CS Group was a serious supplier or just a vehicle to be sold. Having merged with CS Group for £500 million, Iris now has to come up with a strategy that will turn different but fundamentally similar products into a coherent division offering discrete products. Arlene Adams, managing director of Iris's legal and compliance solutions division, recently talked exclusively to the Gazette about Iris’s plans for the future. Once upon a time, Ms Adams was employed at IBM. Later she became UK sales director for one of the best-known IT companies in the world – Sun Microsystems. Before she landed at CS Group, she was chief executive of an online payments company. This background has given her a different perspective on the legal IT market in the UK, one that other general IT people might recognise: that the business of legal IT is immature. "One of the things that struck me when I came into this market is that it's grown up out of family or lifestyle businesses, and it's not necessarily got the same practices and methodologies that you'd see in place in industrial-strength software companies." Law firms, in the round, are behind other sectors in terms of their use of IT, she agrees. It seems counter-intuitive, but this can be an advantage for both law firms and Iris, because the IT directions for law firms are laid for them to a great extent. "What we need to do as a company is take the best ideas of how technologies work in other markets and then apply that in the legal market," explains Ms Adams. How well customer relationship management has worked for other business sectors and how well it works for many law firms using it is a good example, she says. With her background at Sun and IBM, she thinks Iris can bring the world of mature corporate IT solutions to this nascent market. She also agrees that law firms, on the whole, are behind other sectors in terms of their use of IT. It seems counter-intuitive, but this can be an advantage for both law firms and Iris, because, to a great extent, the IT directions for law firms are already laid out for them. Iris ended up in legal IT through a somewhat unconventional approach. CS Group's buying-up of several UK legal IT suppliers, after, it is widely believed, asking quite a number if they would bite, prompted plenty of whispers that the firm was just grabbing legal users to make a future sale. Then the sale came – a private equity group put up the £500 million to pull CS Group into Iris. Now Iris, and Ms Adams, needs to convince its customers and the market that it can deliver. She accepted that there seems to be uncertainty out there, but, she says, "in the past few months we've really settled everything down, and we've got a very clear plan to where we're going. "When I take customers through what we're doing and why we're doing it, they're really pleased, saying that for the first time there's an industry-leading player putting in significant investment that will not only deliver what they need, but more importantly give them a more secure long-term future, based on industry standards," she says. "That's not something that customers have seen in this market to date." Because legal IT now forms 30% of the Iris business, she added, the venture into legal has to succeed – so Iris is investing heavily in the division, which Ms Adams says should reassure customers. "We're not thinking of this as a short-term business – what we're trying to do here is build long-term sustainable value for all the stakeholders." And, she says, because of the value of the Iris brand outside legal, and the fact that it was already a successful, large company before buying CS Group, the company is well pitched to deliver. "A number-one assumption in any plan has to be protect customer investment," she says. "Customers invest for a period of time, and if we axe products without appropriate warning for customers and the investment they've made, they’ll just walk to another supplier." STRATEGY FOR EVERYONE Iris's solution is possibly the only one that can bridge this seeming divide. In the short to medium term Iris is, Ms Adams says, going to develop a broker technology that will talk to any of the practice management system (PMS) products and allow them to link to Iris-developed front office applications such as document management, customer relationship management or payroll/accounts. This means Iris can develop one of these for all the PMSs it owns, making the strategy viable. These products, says Ms Adams, are "what all our research tells us that customers are looking for". This approach paves the way for what commentators were saying was inevitable – the ultimate move from the PMSs it already owns to a future product. For now, everything is still in the planning stage. "It takes time, you can’t do these things overnight," she says. "You've got to be realistic about it." But over a longer period of time, she says, they want to build a backend system that "takes all of our experience and everything we know about the backend products" but she's keen to stress this needs to be done "in a way that enables a really smooth migration plan for customers with an existing backend, whether it be AIM, Videss or Mountain". Ms Adams, understandably, is extremely reserved about suggesting that customers will be forced to move up to this future practice management system. It would, she seemed to say, be several years before a complete new solution is available. There is still no announced plan for what might be in this future unified backend. But when Iris Legal announces its strategic plans at the beginning of December, this could change. A more immediate customer concern, according to blog postings and various gripes heard over drinks, is that Iris seems to be saying it will keep several distinct products going over a long time, which cannot make good business sense, and therefore cannot be true. This seems to be misunderstanding the statements of Ms Adams, and the former CEO of CS Group Vin Murria, that no products would be end-of-lifed. The facts are that no products will be killed, but the individual products of AIM, Videss and Mountain will eventually be so far overtaken by other products on the market and by whatever solution Iris builds to replace them that customers will be foolish not to migrate. By that time Iris will have enabled them to the extent that migration should be undaunting. The broker, or middleware, solution proposed should allow Iris to stay true to its commitment to its stable of similar products while customers are gradually persuaded that the new solution is one they want to have. There are two problems with this approach. First, it can create its own almost circular problems – Iris has those 4,000 or so law firm customers that it needs to maintain while generating new business, but any new business made before a new PMS is created just puts more customers into areas from which they one day need to be moved. Second, the strategy will therefore inevitably be reactive – Ms Adams has had to create a strategy and needs to bring forth a future plan for the division based on this split-level problem. And this can create more problems. The sooner Iris creates a whole new product line, front- to back-office, the sooner it can move new customers onto it, giving live test cases for existing customers to look to and building the future customer base. But if it does this too soon, CS Group customers may feel they have been railroaded. It is not even clear yet whether any of the existing PMSs will form the basis for the future one. "If we see customers driving us down a particular route that leverages the strength of one particular product set, then I have no issue with that," says Ms Adams. "What I'm not prepared to do is come out with rash statements of strategies." ROOM TO MOVE FORWARD But there are solid advantages to this more big-picture approach. Ms Adams now has room to look at what else customers want, rather than just being a large PMS provider. Instead of spending money forward-developing individual PMSs, Iris can develop or buy in "what customers are asking for", says Ms Adams, such as mobile working, document management, customer relationship management and payroll. The lack of good integrated payroll and HR offerings for law firms surprised Iris, says Ms Adams. Also, Iris has skills and experience in industry-strength HR and payroll systems, she says, to deliver on a long-term, industry-standard solution set. This industry-standard solution will be Microsoft .NET. The fact that CS Group bought Microsoft .NET solution providers has been a boon, because Iris developers know the Microsoft environment well, and because acquired solutions can be developed towards a common goal, says Ms Adams. "I think it helps both in a market perspective and in an internal skill perspective." Also, she says, a lot of Iris's own products are based on a .NET architecture. "There's a remarkable similarity the accounting and the legal products." This a key point in the strategy, she stresses, both because skills and knowledge can be brought into the legal division but also because "the market has made it very clear to us that they want to know that solutions going forward are built on industry-based open standards. The commercial reality," she says, "is that the market has moved to .NET. "What I'm committed to is two things: giving customers a technical migration roadmap which gets them there [to a future set of products] without too much pain, at a time they choose – I don’t want to hold a gun to anyone's head," she says. "Second, it'’s one thing to give people a technical plan, but the other thing that I'm working on is a commercial plan so that no customer is being penalised in terms of when they've made the investment and when they would then have to make a move. I want customers to feel very much in control of that. "Most important is the challenge I’ve given to our commercial team: that the work we do has to be so good that we shouldn’t be asking customers to move – they should want to get there because of the new features, functionality and innovation we're giving them." Convincing firms of this is linked to how Ms Adams understands technology will help law firms survive and thrive – law firms will need technology like this. "Although the legal market likes to think it's different, it's no different from other markets," she says. "At the end of the day it is a commercially operated and driven market. So as soon as you get lawyers who are willing to move the goalposts, the others will either be left behind and disappear, or they'll be forced to do the same." And customers will also provide direction, says Ms Adams. "We should thinking way ahead in terms of how we innovate in this market. We have 90% of the barrister market, and we've got a good share of the solicitors' market. The relationship between barristers and solicitors is very important, and they interact in many ways, from working together to diary appointments to fee-earning and how they pass money to each other, and the opportunity to make much more of that process electronic is significant." "If we can, through the adoption of technology, make that relationship much easier then that makes so much sense" One area Iris is working on, she says, is in matching barristers' diaries to solicitors’ case management. "If these diaries were available online, that you could just search, how much time would you save? Then, once the barrister has performed their duty, then why don't we just electronically bill them?" This is, in its way, a sign of the future, she says. "I think we're starting to see a couple of practices change the boundaries, and as soon as they do that they can start to introduce competitive pressures to the others as a way of differentiating their business. And how the other practices respond to that will determine whether they survive or whether they fall away, because there'll always be someone who'’s prepared to do it." In other words, the future of law firms is technologically enabled and the challenge to Iris is to take its bought-in customer base forward to a product set that helps it fight it out from a position of advantage. Ms Adams is determined, forthright and earnest when she talks about the strategic future of the firm's legal business. With all those clients and the viability of the company riding on her division’s future, she cannot afford to slip up. From what she told us, there is a long-term plan, which is an improvement on what customers could see six months ago. Now she just has to slug it out in the marketplace. • Rupert White is a member of the news team on the Law Society's Gazette and the magazine's IT specialist. This is an extended version of an article that first appeared in last Thursday's edition of the Gazette. For further details check out www.lawgazette.co.uk and http://tinyurl.com/2o5ojf Tuesday, November 13
Readers Poll - Blackberry a handy gadget or critical application
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 13 Nov 2007 09:22 GMT
Last month Legal Technology Insider asked a series of questions in its online reader poll to see whether the Blackberry device was still regarded as a handy gadget or had now become a business critical application for law firms.
The first finding to stand out from the results was the wide range of tasks Blackberrys are now being used for: • 100% said email (no surprises there), • 95.5% said calendar and scheduling, • 77.3% said they also used it as a mobile phone, • 9.1% said it was being used for digital dictation, • 4.6% said billing, and • 22.7% cited accessing ‘other applications’. This topic was also discussed at the lunch hosted by the Insider and Avanquest earlier this month (November 2007) where the point was made that the ability of the latest versions of document management systems to integrate with Blackberry and effectively handle the filing of email messages had significantly boosted the status of the Blackberry from handy to critical. This view was echoed in the survey, which found that 66.7% of firms agreed that the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) must be considered a critical application for business continuity and disaster recovery purposes. When asked how long a firm could function effectively without access to a BES: • 27.3% said it would become critical after between 30 minutes and two hours; • 22.7% said between two and four hours, and, • 41% said between eight and 24 hours. But there were also 9% who said a BES crash would have no impact on them. Given this apparent importance, it is surprising that only 50% of respondents said their Blackberry infrastructure was part of their firms’ current DR and business continuity strategies. There again, the BES does seem robust, with 50% of respondents saying they had suffered no server failures over the past 12 months, and 45.5% saying they had only lost user connectivity on between one and five occasions. We also asked about the size of Blackberry installations at law firms • 32% of respondents saying they had between 200 and 500 Blackberrys, • 4.6% had between 500 and 1000 Blackberry devices, and • 9.1% had 1000 plus. • 22.7% had between 50 and 200 • 31% had less than 50. In terms of Blackberry Enterprise Servers, 68.2% had just one BES server, 18.2% had between 2 and 5, and 13.6% had more than 5 servers. Finally we asked who got the Blackberrys in your firms. The most popular answer (45.5%) was all partners & fee earners who ask and only 9.1% said all partners & fee earners. However 18.2% said support & support staff would receive Blackberrys and 22.7% said "anyone who asks". But we did also have 4.6% of respondents who said only partners got them. The debate over lunch also revealed the interesting fact that while many firms had a notional policy of optional Blackberrys (in otherwords you could have one if you wanted one) fee earners and trainees who did not ask for a Blackberry, subsequently did so because they felt it was viewed as demonstrating a lack of commitment to the firm and so constitute a black mark against their name when it came to their next appraisal/review. The view at lunch was that the cultural issues surrounding the use of Blackberrys had not been properly addressed, with both clients and lawyers falling into the trap of feeling that because it was always-on 24/7 technology, they ought to respond to incoming messages on a 24/7 basis. Another comment was the fact that along with taking their Blackberrys on holiday, it was also now common to see people checking their Blackberrys during meetings and conferences when they should have been concentrating on other matters. (We also heard that at one firm a partner had gone down with RSI because he used his Blackberry so much.) Two other points to come out of the lunch were that: • While billing was a popular application to run on the Blackberry, it was probably fairer to say it was the reporting side of these systems (how much WIP relates to this client, how much have we billed them in the past, how much do they owe us etc) rather than mobile time recording, that was the most widely used feature. • And, it was also suggested that the reason for the relatively poor take-up of Windows Mobile etc devices was that most lawyers do not have a need to create or edit Word or any other Microsoft Office documents on a PDA - not least because of the pokey screens - and so where happy to stick with their almost idiot-proof Blackberrys. As one IT director pointed out: as long as they receive the message and know the document is available (and which they can at least now read on a Blackberry) they don't need all the functionality (and complexity) of Windows Mobile. You can find the Readers Poll located on the right handside of the LegalTechnology.com website. This month we are asking about law firm IT budgets as a percentage of turnover – as ever all responses to the questions are strictly confidential www.legaltechnology.com Monday, November 5
England out of IRIS - old news, no shock, no drama
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 05 Nov 2007 13:40 GMT
We've been receiving reports over the weekend of supposed fresh upheavals at IRIS resulting in the departure of David England. Sorry guys but there's nothing to see, no shocks, no drama and certainly no blood on the boardroom floor, so move along please. In fact technically this is not even news as David England's departure was actually announced by IRIS Group chief executive Martin Leuw back on the 12th September. This is the wording of the announcement...
"Shortly after the merger with CS Group was announced, David England let me know in strictest confidence, that he wanted to resign from his current position, ideally once the first 100 day integration period was complete. "As many of you will be aware, David has held senior positions within the business over the past two years, most notably as Chief Operating Officer of Computer Software Group Plc. I'd like to thank David personally for the energetic support and professionalism he has shown to me and the team during the merger and on behalf of us all within the Group wish him every success for the future. David will be stepping down from his current role on 30th September and will then be available for a period of handover. "On the 1st October, Ian Ashby, (who will be joining us in mid-September to start the handover from David), will become the new MD of Not for Profit & Major Business Solutions, taking over responsibility for all those areas currently covered by David England." |
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