Esker SA

Esker SA is is a software producer and service provider headquartered in Lyon, France with U.S. headquarters (Esker, Inc.) in Madison, Wisconsin and subsidiary offices in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. The company’s stated focus is on developing applications and services to help businesses reduce the use of paper within processes such as accounts payable, sales order processing and accounts receivable. Esker software products are sold in the form of pay-per-use cloud services (SaaS) with applications executed on Esker-hosted servers, and in the form of licenses for the use of applications installed at the customer’s site.

Esker began in 1985 as a software consulting company. In March 1989 Esker marketed its first host access software products, which fueled the company’s expansion. Acquisitions in the U.S. over the next 10 years gave Esker access to additional customer bases and North American distributors, and the company diversified its offerings to include fax software products.

As the host access market steadily declined, Esker developed document automation products in response to demand among companies seeking to reduce operational costs, increase productivity, shorten order-to-cash and procure-to-pay cycles, improve customer service and increase efficiency in core activities such as order management. This development led to the 2001 launch of Esker DeliveryWare, a software platform to automate the delivery of enterprise application output via transports including fax, email, PDF, web, print, XML, EDI and SMS. Subsequent additions to the platform’s functionality included OCR software and content-based data capture for inbound document processing, document archiving functionality and workflow automation capabilities.

Esker DeliveryWare technology provided the basis for Esker on Demand cloud fax and postal mail automation services using production facilities in the USA, Europe and Asia-Pacific. In 2005 Esker received a U.S. patent for the rules engine technology in Esker DeliveryWare that performs recognition and extraction of data to determine document formatting, conversion and routing actions.

Also in 2005 Esker added FlyDoc, a simplified version of Esker on Demand designed for small organizations with limited IT resources, to its offering. In 2009 Esker surpassed 200 million pages of documents processed by Esker on Demand cloud services, and the company launched a process-specific service for vendor invoice management, followed by the launch of a sales order processing service in 2010.

Esker claims more than 80,000 customers in primary markets including manufacturing, healthcare, life sciences, financial services, distribution and retail, information technology, telecommunications and media, utilities and energy, government, travel/hospitality/leisure and transportation.

Esker is an SAP software solution partner with certified integration and a line of products and services designed specifically for use with SAP systems.

Marketing

In 2007 at the SAPPHIRE conference and ASUG (Americas’ SAP Users’ Group) Annual Conference in Atlanta, Esker launched the “Quit Paper” campaign aimed at challenging organizations to eliminate unnecessary paper use through automation for operational efficiency and reduced environmental impact.

References

  • Esker 1
  • Quit Paper 2