I’ve been a user of Neat’s scan receipt software and hardware for years. It’s simplified my expenses and given me a certain amount of flexibility when I travel. Like many other vendors, they constantly stive to make their niche more relevant. For them, that means rolling out cloud and mobile services in late 2012. They must have done something right since I signed up for the individual product.
But what caught my eye was a recent email about their new cloud scanner product called Neat Connect. Yes, it scans to the cloud. By default, it scans to their Neat Cloud but what’s interesting is that after they spend all their time telling you how great the tool is and how well it connects to their cloud and mobile services, they then show this:
Note that this nice player with a valuable service just created a product that hooks to every major cloud storage vendor in the market. Note that they put SkyDrive first in that category. When the following has happened, it’s a sure sign that this marketplace is quickly maturing.
- Support API’s for easy integration. Every vendor above does that. SkyDrive has a well documented set.
- Growing ecosystem of vendors with products that rely on these tools. (See a previous post on this)
- Niche vendors who feel compelled to offer support in order to sell their product or service.
Not bad for a category that really isn’t all that old.
