Mass. company buys Nashua-based eCopy

Oct 06, 2009 (The Telegraph - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- NUAN | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- A company that specializes in technologies like speech recognition for automated phone systems and word recognition for text messages has acquired Nashua-based eCopy, Inc. for $54 million in stock.

Nuance Communications Inc., a company headquartered in Burlington, Mass., with 6,000 employees worldwide, announced the purchase Monday. The deal was finalized Sept. 30.

ECopy, founded in 1992, sells products that convert a company's paper documents into electronic form and integrate them into existing business software, where they can be edited and modified. The company's strength in the market has been installing this technology into traditional office copiers, most of which are sold to large corporations.

Nuance also has a document imaging product line, but it caters more to individual business users on their desktops.

"There is a lot of synergy between the two, but we bring different strengths," eCopy founder and CEO Edward Schmid said. "Partnering in this industry is very helpful."

Robert Weideman, general manager and senior vice president at Nuance, said it's too early to tell whether the sale will have any impact on eCopy's Nashua facility, which employs 229. Nuance is working with eCopy now to help integrate the two organizations, he said.

Schmidt said he expects that some duplicate positions will be eliminated down the road. But Nuance isn't making any of those decisions until it's more familiar with eCopy's operations, he said. This is Nuance's 32nd business acquisition in seven years, so the company has a lot of experience merging businesses, Schmid said.

Nuance plans to continue marketing products under the eCopy brand name.

Traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange, Nuance products are more recognizable than its name. The company makes voice recognition technology used by major companies like Bank of America, United Airlines and Wells Fargo in their automated phone systems. It also makes technology that automatically corrects words in text messages, which is used in more than 3 million cell phones.

The company's document imaging line includes three main products: OmniPage, which turns paper documents into Microsoft Word documents or Excel spreadsheets that can be edited; PaperPort, a scanning and electronic filing system; and PDF Converter, the biggest competitor to Adobe Acrobat.

The company has more than 30 offices worldwide.

ECopy got its start in the early 1990s with Schmid and a handful of other employees working out of his condominium. The company now occupies its own building on Spit Brook Road and sells its products around the world. The company was originally called Simplify Development Corp., but the name was changed in 2000.

In March, eCopy announced that it had expanded to China by signing a contract with a distributor there, expanding its technology to the second largest market for IT purchases in the world.

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