As a result of the new agreement, Headway Technology, a division of ACAL IT, will begin distributing and promoting ABBYY document recognition and data capture products through its reseller channels in the United Kingdom and Belgium. The agreement expands upon ABBYY's current relationship with Headway which has served as an ABBYY distribution partner in Germany, Austria and Switzerland since spring 2005.

Starting immediately, Headway's offices in the UK and Belgium will begin selling and promoting ABBYY form processing, semi-structured document processing, and document conversion solutions and technologies. Products which will be available through Headway include: ABBYY FormReader, ABBYY FlexiCapture Studio, and the recently announced ABBYY Recognition Server.

"Headway was the first European distributor to enter the document management/ information management market and has built up many years of experience and knowledge in this channel," explained Jupp Stoepetie, managing director for ABBYY Europe. "Their sales, marketing and technical support teams understand not only our products, but those of our partners as well as the hardware which supports these products. This agreement will enable ABBYY to expand its channel partnerships and channel support infrastructure, especially within vertical markets and specialised areas."

Headway is a value added distributor (VAD) and the UK's leading supplier of document scanners and has experience selling a variety of document management and data capture solutions.  "Headway's goal is to offer the best combination of hardware and software tools for our partners to put together enterprise document management business solutions," explained David Lewis, co-founder and managing director of Headway Technology. "By adding ABBYY products to our portfolio, we can offer high performance, proven, software that is clearly recognised as a market leader."

The Headway group has established a solid client base which includes major Systems Integrators, Systems Developers and Value Added Resellers. Companies currently represented include: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Canon, Fujitsu Europe, Kofax Image Products and LizardTech.

ABBYY FormReader is a solution for high performance, easy to deploy, recognition of data from forms and other documents for input into databases and content management systems.  This out-of-box solution offers easy form template creation and management and powerful tools for processing, verification, and validation. Together with ABBYY FlexiCapture technology ABBYY FormReader can be expanded to recognise form fields on a variety of documents with different layouts enabling easy processing semi-structured forms and documents such as invoices, claim forms, contracts with headers, etc. ABBYY Recognition Server is a robust server-based solution for automating recognition and PDF conversion processes in enterprise and service-oriented environments. Recognition Server provides independent, server-based OCR processing with minimal user involvement and centralised management, and is easily scalable to large volume document processing.