An Interview with Steve Luke, Eclipse Corporation CEO: ‘Don’t Change your Business Software, Change your Document or Form Software’

“Today, we have a rock solid product, a global presence in over 60 countries and lots of ideas for improving the solutions we provide.”

When goods and services cross borders in international trade, information needs to be passed between relevant parties, whether private companies or public bodies, including suppliers, logistics providers, customs, regulatory agencies, sellers and buyers. Paperless trade refers to the digitization of these information flows, including making available and enabling the exchange of trade-related data and documents electronically. Less formally, one can think of this as cross-border trade transactions using electronic data in lieu of paper-based documents.

Transforming what was traditionally a paper-based documentation system into an electronic format can speed up trade and ease the cost of doing business in today’s interconnected world.

Eclipse Corporation provides enterprise-class e-forms and documents generation software solutions. It offers DocOrigin, a form, document, and label design software and document generation software to meet the needs of high volume and complex applications.

The company was incorporated in 2005 and is headquartered in Cape Coral, Florida.

Steve Luke, Eclipse Corporation CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Why was the company set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

Eclipse’s founders have been focused on enterprise-class form, document, and label software solutions for most of their business life. Our team was involved in the creation of some of the most successful forms software solutions in the world. So it made sense when we founded Eclipse that we focused on the one business where we had extensive knowledge of this industry. 

The enterprise forms market is a mature market. The forms software that most customers use today is obsolete, in many cases it may even be sunset. When we created DocOrigin, we used all the experience we gained from creating products like JetForm - Adobe Central, LiveCycle, FormsPlus/400, StreamServe and built DocOrigin from scratch. So we started with a clean slate, learning from the errors made in previous products. We grew rapidly by using our previous experience to create Rapid Migration Software features that allow Eclipse and our partners to replace the aging legacy forms software created by the top competitors in our industry. DocOrigin drastically reduces the cost of migration for our customers. For instance, we can convert Adobe form templates in seconds and reduce QA and Testing time substantially. Simple and medium complexity forms can be completed in minutes or hours instead of hours or days. Even complex forms can be converted between 60 and 95 percent which creates huge savings.

Q. How successful was your first project roll on? Share the experience.

Our first project was a huge success, we were fortunate to convince a former client that used the technology we created in the late 90s and which was acquired by Adobe in 2001 to test our software. This company had over 200 small retail stores which used the Adobe Software. The Adobe software had been sunset, so they had to find a replacement. They looked at several alternatives and we provided a proof of concept using DocOrigin. DocOrigin’s performance blew the doors off of the competition. Using 1/4th of the CPUs and 1/5th the memory, DocOrigin produced 320 percent more documents than our leading competitor and our price was about 20 percent lower.

Q. What challenges did you face in your initial years? 

Our biggest challenge came from the fact that many prospects had become complacent and had accepted that the documents, forms and labels they were delivering were good enough. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. So the sense of urgency was not in their mind. Another problem was that many of these companies were using aging or obsolete ERP, MRP, EHR software to run their core business. We overcame these problems by closing several major deals with 3M, AT&T, GE Healthcare, Pella Windows & Doors, and more. With these flagship customers we proved we had a reliable, high performance, features rich software solution. On top of that, we provide scalable pricing and offer the same product and features to companies of all sizes and industries. Winning OEM deals with Advantage 360, GE Healthcare, Guidwire Insurance, Tyler Technologies etc. also expanded our install base exponentially. Today, we have a rock solid product, a global presence in over 60 countries and lots of ideas for improving the solutions we provide.

Q. What kind of responses have you received from your consumers over the years? How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?

As I said earlier, many of our current customers did not jump on our original offers, for various reasons. Mostly because of the ‘if it ain’t broke’ mindset. They had a solution in place and it worked. However, our team had a very good reputation for providing personal attention to our customers. So when these companies did decide to replace their forms software they came to us. They were motivated by our reliability, performance, scalable price and features like omni channel delivery, PDF/UA, Fillable Forms and advanced delivery methods Adaptive HTML for smartphone, tablets, etc.

Q. Building a culture of sustainability within an organization is very important to maintain a reputation in the global market. How is it true for your company?

Eclipse is a privately held company, we are debt free and our core team has worked together for decades. We do not live for the end of the quarter or end of the year. We are here for the long haul. Products like DocOrigin have a life expectancy of 15 to 20 years, the only reason to sunset them is when the hardware or OS they are running on becomes obsolete. Our policy related to the future is to provide our customers with a new version of our software even if we have to move to a new platform. If the customer is covered by our M&S, we will move them to the new software on a supported platform. All they have to do is continue the M&S payments.

Q. Where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

Our goal is to stay competitive and maintain our reliability. We have some mature team members and we are investing in the next generation of our team so we can maintain the quality of our product and maintain our competitive edge in the future.

“We offer a full range of software solutions for all your document design and automation needs – built from the ground up by the team that developed Adobe Central and JetForm. As pioneers in the enterprise document automation industry, the Eclipse team has the knowledge, experience and track-record your company can rely on.”