Company Overview

ABBYY develops linguistic and artificial intelligence (AI) software providing a full line of document recognition, document conversion and data capture technologies and products. ABBYY is an international company with over 600 employees worldwide (as of June 2007). The overall number of users of ABBYY products and technologies exceeds 20 million people all over the world (according to internal research). Most ABBYY products have been developed in ABBYY Headquarters in Moscow, Russia.

• ABBYY’s Mission
• ABBYY Products
• ABBYY History
• ABBYY Personnel
• Scientific Research in Real Business
• Partners and Clients
  

ABBYY’s Mission

ABBYY’s mission is to improve the quality of life by developing artificial intelligence technologies for efficiently capturing, translating, and transforming information into accessible and useful knowledge.

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ABBYY Products

OCR and Document Conversion Applications

• ABBYY FineReader, an award-winning Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software that allows users to convert paper documents, PDF files, and various images including photographs taken by a digital camera to editable formats for changing and repurposing.
• ABBYY PDF Transformer, a PDF conversion and creation program, that allows users to convert any type of PDF files into editable files and create searchable PDFs directly from Microsoft Office applications.
• ABBYY ScanTo Office, a smart uility which converts paper documents to editable and searchable files.

Data Capture and Form Processing

• ABBYY FlexiCapture, a dynamic data capture solution to automatically process multiple document types in a single stream. ABBYY FlexiCapture processes documents of any type and complexity (including structured forms, semi-structured and unstructured documents) that makes it broadly usable in any industry.

Products for VARs and Software Developers

• The ABBYY FineReader Engine SDKs allow developers to integrate ABBYY's document recognition/conversion and data capture technologies into their own solutions;
• ABBYY Recognition Server, a robust server-based solution for automating the recognition and PDF conversion process in enterprise environments;
• The ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK, an OS-independent, small code-size OCR development toolkit designed for creating OCR solutions running on mobile devices or in "instant OCR" applications.

Dictionary Software

• ABBYY Lingvo, a multilingual dictionary software for PC and mobile devices. ABBYY Lingvo is the most widely spread dictionary software in Russia with estimated number of users exceeding 5 000 000* people. It contains about 7,400,000 entries in 128 dictionaries and provides translation of words and word combinations from Russian to English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Latin and the over way around.

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ABBYY History

ABBYY (BIT Software before 1997) was founded in 1989 by David Yang (now the Chairman of the Board).
David, being then a student of MIPT, decided to found a company in order to develop the ABBYY’s first product - English-Russian-English dictionary software, called Lingvo. The idea of the electronic dictionary occurred to David during a French lesson. Searching for the translation in a heavy book, he imagined a simple and easy tool that would allow finding translations in seconds. The first version of Lingvo was followed by the second one, improved. The company, its business and personnel expanded and other product lines were introduced, including FineReader OCR application, FormReader system for data capture and form processing, developer toolkits, etc.

In a few years after launching the FineReader OCR series, ABBYY realized that the quality of the product far exceeded the analogues not only in Russia, but also abroad. Therefore, in 1997 ABBYY decided to expand its business to the global arena through licensing FineReader to global scanner manufacturers and distributing boxed product via a partner network. Growth of ABBYY’s international business resulted in opening of several international offices and strengthening its international partner network in the period from 1995 to 2002. By 2003 ABBYY had 5 offices worldwide and a distributor network, selling its products in 89 countries. At the same time ABBYY became one of the largest and most respected software companies in Russia, with about 250 people in staff at the Moscow office.

Further maturity of the company brought new challenges. Therefore, since 2004, along with further expansion to new markets, ABBYY has spent a lot of effort on optimizing its operations and streamlining and diversifying its product portfolio. Also, in this period ABBYY strengthened its focus on developing “technology” products – software development kits (SDK) and enterprise solutions. That brought ABBYY to the leading position of provider of OCR, form processing and data capture technologies on the global ECM and document management market.

The most important dates in the ABBYY history:

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ABBYY Personnel

Since the early days ABBYY attracted very bright engineers, scientists and managers. That partly is a result of the emphasis of company’s management on attracting individual talents, providing them the right environment for growth and fostering the collaborative work. There are three main pillars of ABBYY’s HR strategy: 1) Hire the best people; 2) Let them evolve; 3) Keep them motivated.

From the very beginning the company comprised mostly of the graduates from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. MIPT has a global reputation of one of the elite centers of natural science and education. Since that time ABBYY tried to maintain the highest intellectual standards of its employees, carefully selecting the most talented candidates through a painstaking process. Now ABBYY employs graduates from the world-famous Russian high schools – MIPT, Moscow State University etc. The main qualities, expected from a candidate are: broad intellect, ability to solve unusual tasks, collaborative skills, initiative and ability to learn fast.

Hiring talented people proved to be a necessary, but not a sufficient measure. In order to implement the highest standards of software development, ABBYY had to create a proprietary education and certification system for all employees of the R&D department. All staff, involved in a software development and support, has to pass extensive tests in order to comply with the standards, accepted by the company. ABBYY’s marketing and administration staff is encouraged to increase its professional level by attending various courses, organized inside and outside of the company. Further professional education is welcome and can be partly subsidized by the company’s management.

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Scientific Research in Real Business

In scientific research, any result is good: positive or negative. A scientific experiment produces results that are not tangible in the commercial sense. They are abstract. Whereas for the experiment’s sake a negative result is still a good result, in business sense such outcome is not acceptable. Therefore, the biggest challenge for a developer of commercial technologies who depends to a large extent on the results of scientific research is to ensure stable, progressive and consistent offer of new advanced products to the market. 

ABBYY can attract, carefully select and retain talented individuals who form a unique and efficient team (R&D, marketing, administration, management). This team is able to produce and deliver commercial products of the highest quality on the basis of complex yet abstract AI research. 

ABBYY has the knowledge and experience in selecting, training and motivating people who could contribute to the team’s success. This unique team is able to harness the unpredictability of pure science and use it for real-life applications and technologies, allowing people to capture information and transform it into accessible and useful knowledge.

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Partners and Clients

To focus on the highest possible quality of the products is a part of ABBYY’s business strategy. ABBYY has a slogan that “quality sells itself.” Effectively, heavy investments into high quality standards reduce promotional efforts, because it is relatively easy to convince partners and customers to use ABBYY products. Besides, good customer experience creates good reputation and loyalty: both of which help to introduce new products to the market.

Right now, almost 20 million* people around the world use ABBYY products to solve their business and personal needs to capture, translate and transform documents. Almost half of the new world’s scanners* are supplied with ABBYY technologies. Every time a user converts or OCRs a document page he or she saves about 14 minutes*. Using ABBYY’s linguistic software not only saves time but enables a user to understand, read and translate texts in foreign languages.

The quality of ABBYY's technologies in the fields of document recognition, applied linguistics and data capture have won wide acclaim from software developers. Many companies worldwide integrated these technologies into their own applications. It is a result of many years of research studies carried out by ABBYY since the date of its foundation. Since April of 1996, ABBYY technologies have been licensed by:

AISoft, Inc. (Japan, USA), Archivista (Switzerland), Arkenstone (USA), BancTec (USA), C-Technologies (Sweden), Canon Australia (Australia), Captiva (USA), Document Centric Solutions (Ireland), Citybank N.A. (India), Cobra Technologies (USA), Easy Software AG (Germany), GrantSmart (USA), IXOS Software AG (Germany), j2 Global Communications, Inc. (USA), Janich&Klass (Germany), Lanit (Russia), Legato Systems, Inc. (USA), Kofax Image Products (USA), Kurzweil Educational Systems, Inc. (USA), Meta Technology (Russia), New Soft (USA), Nezavisimaya Gazeta Daily (Russia), Notable Solutions Inc. (USA), Optika, Inc. (USA), OTG Software (USA), Primax (the Netherlands) ReadSoft AB (Sweden), Reserve Bank of Australia (Australia), S4M - Solutions for Media (Germany), Samsung Electronics (South Korea), Saperion AG (Germany), SER Systems AG (Germany), Siemens Business Services AG (Germany), Siemens Nixdorf (Germany), Sumitomo Electric Industries (Japan), TMP Worldwide (Australia, New Zealand), Toshiba Corporations (Japan, USA), Vest (Russia), Vitova Ltd. (Hong Kong), ZyLAB Technoilogies B.V. (the Netherlands) and many others.

ABBYY's form processing and data capture products are used for needs of many government agencies and commercial organizations all over the world, for example: Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club e.V. (Germany), Connecticut Braille Association (USA), Indian Educational Institutions (India), Finansbank (Turkey), Lithuanian Tax Inspectorate (Lithuania), Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation (Russia), Ministry of Rural Development of Malaysia (Malaysia), Prodco TV (UK) and much more.

ABBYY has a range of global OEM agreements with equipment manufacturers to supply special versions of ABBYY FineReader with their devices. The following hardware companies ship products that contain FineReader technology: BenQ (Acer), Dell, Epson, Foxlink, Fujitsu, Maxium, Microtek, Mustek, Panasonic, Plustek, Primax, Ricoh, Toshiba, UMAX, Xerox and others.

For more information, see the full list of case studies.

ABBYY actively promotes its products on local and international markets. ABBYY is an open company - we are always ready to provide detailed information and factual material to the press. If you are a journalist and want to tell your readers about our technologies, please visit the ABBYY Press Room or contact ABBYY PR manager in your region.

* According to internal research.

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