ISIS Papyrus

ISIS Papyrus
Private company
Industry Software
Headquarters Maria Enzersdorf, Austria
Southlake, Texas, United States
Singapore
Key people
 Annemarie Pucher, Founder & CEO
Max J. Pucher, Founder & Chief Architect
Number of employees
 270 (January 2009)
Website http://www.isis-papyrus.com

ISIS Papyrus is a Swiss-based commercial software development group that sells its products globally through subsidiaries or business partners. ISIS Papyrus develops standard software products for consolidated customer communication and adaptive process management for enterprise organizations in the financial, utility, telecommunications, healthcare, insurance and public sectors.

ISIS Papyrus has 16 worldwide offices, 14 subsidiaries and three development centers and around 2,000 enterprise and government customers globally. Their implementations cover process improvement, business correspondence, multi-channel output, e-mail, document capture and archiving. Software development is performed in Austria, Italy and Germany.

History

1988 ISIS Information Systems GmbH founded by Annemarie and Max J. Pucher as an IBM Business Partner for S/370 in Austria
1990 Introduction of OverView AFP Designer for graphical forms design, which is sold today also by IBM under the label InfoPrint Designer
1991 Restructuring of the business under a Swiss Group Holding to facilitate international growth
1991 Incorporation of US headquarters in Dallas, Texas
1992 Opening of the newly built office building in Ma. Enzersdorf, Austria
1993 Incorporation of Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore
1994 Introduction of Papyrus Designer and DocEXEC for dynamically paginating business documents such as invoices and policies
1995 Introduction of Papyrus Print Server to transform AFP printstreams to different printers such as PCL3/4/5, Postscript and IPDS
1996 Introduction of Papyrus PrintPool for document output management
1998 Introduction of the Papyrus WebArchive as a standalone product
1998 Incorporation of ISIS Papyrus Italy SRL for software development in Ivrea
1999 Acquisition of Improx AG, a provider of document capture, imaging and OCR technology
2001 Introduction of the Papyrus Platform using the Papyrus Objects architecture for integration, content and process management with the WebRepository
2001 Opening of the newly built office for the US headquarters in Southlake, Texas
2002 Acquisition of ÖDAF GmbH, a German software company with its TEXID product line
2003 Introduction of the Papyrus WebPortal for the Papyrus Platform
2003 Opening of the fully restored Villa Solaro as office building in Ivrea, Italy
2004 Integration of Papyrus WebArchive into the Papyrus Platform
2005 Introduction of an integrated single-sign-on technology for the Papyrus Platform with SmartCard and fingerprint user authentication
2006 Introduction of the User-Trained Agent (UTA), a patented functionality of Papyrus that uses transductive training to enable complex event processing (CEP)
2007 Announcement of Papyrus Platform V7 with Activity Recorder, Natural Language Rules and Papyrus EYE GUI technology, a Rich Internet Application using Flash, Ajax or iPhone
2007 Opening of the fully restored Watership Barn as office building in Kingsclere, UK
2008 20th anniversary
2008 Annemarie Pucher nominated finalist for Stevie Lifetime Achievement Award for Women in Business
2009 Max Pucher receives Lifetime Achievement Award from Xplor International
2010 Roberto Anzola, Manager R&D, elected to the Board of Directors of the AFP Consortium
2010 Annemarie Pucher receives "Women of Distinction" honors from OutputLinks[1]
2012 Merger of ISIS Marketing Service GmbH and ISIS Information Systems GmbH to newly created ISIS Papyrus Europe AG

Group Structure

ISIS Holding AG, Zug, Switzerland (1991, Privately held parent company)
ISIS Papyrus Software AG, Zug Switzerland (1991)
ISIS Information Systems GmbH, Ma. Enzersdorf, Austria (1988)
ISIS Marketing Service GmbH (1991)
ISIS Papyrus America, Inc., Southlake, TX (1992)
ISIS Papyrus Deutschland GmbH, Düsseldorf, BRD (2002)
ISIS Papyrus Asia Pacific Ltd., Singapore (1993)
ISIS Papyrus UK Ltd., Kingsclere (1997)
ISIS Papyrus Italy SRL, Ivrea (1998)
ISIS Papyrus France S.A., Paris (2005)
ISIS Toth SL, Madrid, Spain (1997, Joint venture)
ISIS Papyrus Netherlands SA, (2008)
ISIS Papyrus Nordics ApS, Denmark (2009)
ISIS Papyrus Europa AG, Austria (2012)

Common Applications

Most common applications implemented with Papyrus:

ISIS Papyrus Business Concepts

According to interviews with the principals on the World Business Review with Caspar Weinberger, the ISIS Papyrus Group has a strong customer focus. Also recently, Chief Architect Max J. Pucher stated in an article in the Fort Worth Business Press [2] that quality rather than cost reduction must be the management focus at all times to ensure customer loyalty. In an interview in the German BIT magazine Annemarie Pucher said that revenue is not a business target but rather achieving a balanced triangle between customers, employees and owners.

ISIS Papyrus only delivers standard software. It never customizes this software for a particular client. Enhancements are always part of the standard product delivery. ISIS Papyrus does also not offer any APIs (application programming interfaces) because they create a rigid structure with the customer and are not portable between operating system platforms. All modules are developed in C++ operating system independent source code and do not use platform specific libraries such as MS-MFC or similar. Therefore all modules are identical on all platforms.[3]

ISIS Papyrus has a degressive pricing model for multiple copies rather than offering arbitrary discounts from the list price. All customers receive those same discounts. ISIS Papyrus offers a maintenance agreement that protects the investment into the software. Software under maintenance can be traded in for new products or switched to other operating systems for the difference in list price. The maintenance does in most cases include ALL software upgrades AND version changes. The maintenance also includes the support of the Project Quality Assurance, a team that supports the customers in the implementation and early production phase.[4]

ISIS Papyrus has a professional certification program for its consultants and its business partners resulting in a large international group of consultants that perform customer projects.[5]

Technology & Innovation

One of the most important innovations of ISIS Papyrus was the mandatory use of an electronic document format for document management rather than driving the printers directly. The ISIS concept is to make the application program independent of the printer hardware. In 1994 that step was a true innovation. Lacking any other well documented format ISIS used the IBM AFP datastream format that is still in widespread use for high volume applications. The most important benefit of using such a format was the standardization of all document resources such as fonts, images and forms and therefore the ability to choose the print destination and print technology only at time of print. Till today other vendors generate only one print stream at a time and thus supply no electronic original that could be post-processed and archived. PDF has partly taken the role of the electronic original since it has been standardized as PDF/A. PDF is still not well suited for very high-volume applications.

The key difference to other DOM (Document Output Management) vendors is the script-based formatting language defined in the fully graphical Papyrus Designer. Formatting throughput is up to 50 million pages per hour. Approximately 50% of all documents supplied with issued American Credit Cards are formatted with the Papyrus formatting engine at the largest service organizations.

In 1997 ISIS started to provide the Papyrus Client, a user interactive front-end for letter generation that is fully compatible to the DocEXEC formatting engine. It became immediately apparent that providing users with interactive document capabilities requires to control the related document process. Customers developed their own user interfaces or integrated the Papyrus Client into workflow scenarios with a huge effort. ISIS decided to provide an extremely flexible application front-end to reduce the development effort and provide tightly integrated change management for content and process applications. This architecture was named Papyrus Objects.

To manage this application environment a central facility was needed which was named Papyrus WebRepository. While the Papyrus Objects architecture was initially provided as a front-end workflow mechanism, over the years it turned into a powerful platform because of customer needs. The first large installations were done in 2001. The applications capabilities were marketed into the document management arena as 'The Document Switchboard'. With the addition of a rules engine, data federation adapters, the WebPortal and full versioning the system is now referred to as 'The Papyrus Platform' for content and process management.

In 1999 ISIS Papyrus acquired the Document Capture specialist Improx AG, whose Machine Learning Document Classification technology was then integrated into the Papyrus Platform, making ISIS the very first vendor to propose an Inbound-Process-Outbound ECM (Enterprise Content Management) scenario in 2001.

The backbone of the ISIS Papyrus Platform is a distributed object-relational database which is configured automatically by object definitions in WebRepository. Through its patented object-oriented Enterprise Service Bus it communicates with all servers and PCs in a network independently of the operating system. It enables versioned changes of object definitions throughout the system from a single point. The ISIS Papyrus Platform enables in the terms of Forrester Research dynamic business applications.[6]

Studies have shown that this architecture saves huge amounts of maintenance costs in typical enterprise applications [7] by reducing application development time, change management, business agility and empowers non-technical users to adapt business processes and content as needed without involving IT experts.

Other studies have recognized the rich features of the ISIS Papyrus solutions for specific applications such as the Automated Document Factory[8] and TransPromo,[9] respectively. At the same time authors have acknowledged the importance of the integrated flexible workflow capabilities of ISIS Papyrus.[10]

In 2009 ISIS Papyrus released a free AFP Viewer in cooperation with the AFP Consortium.[11]

In 2010 ISIS Papyrus became a foundational sponsor of OASIS - the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. They are a member of the OASIS Technical Committee for CMIS, which is fully implemented in the underlying technology of Papyrus.[12] 2010 saw also the release of the first application for iPhone/iPod and iPad.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ OutputLinks Honors Ten Global Professionals as Women of Distinction Article retrieved on April 12, 2012
  2. ↑ Quality should remain focus - even in tough times Article retrieved on July 28, 2010
  3. ↑ The Butler Group: Technology Audit: ISIS Papyrus Software – Papyrus Platform v7
  4. ↑ Personal communication Manager Project Quality Assurance 2008/11/29
  5. ↑ List of Certified Papyrus Service Providers
  6. ↑ John Rymer, Conny Moore: The Dynamic Business Applications Imperative
  7. ↑ Ed Steenhoek: Executive Briefing on ECM in the Netherlands
  8. ↑ Strategy Partners: Innovation in Automated Document Process Management
  9. ↑ Madison Advisors: TransPromo Workflow Solutions: An Evolving Market Defined
  10. ↑ Steve Watters: Emerging Trends in the Automated Document Factory
  11. ↑ Michael Zobel: Free ISIS Papyrus AFP Viewer
  12. ↑ OASIS Members Approve Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Standard

External links