Omniplanar - Premium Product, Premium Price, The Right Choice.

Published 04 June 07 10:25 PM | Garrett Russell

After coming out of a seminar on pricing, and as I pondered why we don't have 100% market share in bar code decoding software, I looked back on some of the recent opportunities that we did not win.  In each case, our premium price had something to do with it, and I am frequently hit with the comment, "I am just trying to scan bar codes, and this other decoder meets my needs".  Lets talk about "needs" for a moment.  When selecting a bar code decoder "needs" goes beyond reading a few sample images.  Do your "needs" include: no downtime? no crashes? high read rate, not just on test  bar codes, but real-world poor images? no misreads? anything else? 

Once our customers are up and running, we rarely hear from them.  Is this a good thing? Well, a salesperson may get paranoid that they may be looking at another product, but in reality, Omniplanar's products run all-day, everyday without fail and with a significantly higher read rate than anything else on the market. Our customers are pleased with the choice they made and understand that the extra effort that we put into our products to make them reliable and robust, goes a long way in reducing their technical support needs.

I recently spoke with a friend that runs a very small software company, and he deals with 8-10 technical support calls a day, and he needs to hire a support person to handle some of the extra load expected from the growth.  At Omniplanar, we do not have a dedicated technical support person. Why? We don't need it.  And the added benefit to this, is that when you do call, you speak to the engineer(s) that wrote the code. And they are very willing to help you and look forward to seeing the images that you have captured.

Filed under: , , , , ,

Comments

# mdornseif said on January 8, 2008 02:42 PM:

An other reason for not 100% market penetration: you are HARD to find on the internet. I have been shopping for barcode decoding libraries for some time now but never happened to come across Omniplanar. I found ClearImage, DocBridge Mill, Softek Barcode Reader Toolkit, Stecos barcode SDKs, RBarcode Vision, mvIMPACT and lots of GPL Software. I liked none of them. Now I found SwiftDecoder and it looks very nice. So obviously my searenginf-foo sux or your Internet visibility is ... not perfect.

# Garrett Russell said on January 8, 2008 02:54 PM:

Thank you for the feedback.  For many years, Omniplanar was well known in the Automatic Identification Industry (AIDC) as a supplier of the best decoder for reading bar codes (1D, 2D & Postal) in the market, however the ownership did not promote or market their product beyond AIDC.  

We have spent the last year and a half increasing our brand awareness outside of the AIDC market and are concentrating on other markets.  Our support portal and blog are just some of the tools we are using to increase brand recognition.  

We are confident that once you test our decoder, that you will be pleased with the performance, as we are significantly superior to the companies you mentioned above in both speed and recognition.

What bar code symbologies are you looking to read?

Have you downloaded our trial software?  

If so, do you have any feedback on our performance?

I look forward to your response, and again, thank you for your comments.