Esker is boosting its R&D staff by 30% to support a push into "cloud" document automation solutions in 2010.

These new team members will primarily focus on development, software quality testing and software, infrastructure and platforms delivered as a service.

Esker ‘cloud’ computing services and solutions complement Esker’s on premise solutions for document process automation, used for the processing of invoices, bank statements, collection letters, payslips, and marketing and sales documents.

"This is great news for Australian and New Zealand companies, where many companies including BHP Billiton, Orica, Visy, etc are relying on Esker Cloud Computing solutions," said Christophe DuMonet, Managing Director of Esker ANZ.

Before the end of 2010, 20 new technical staff will join Esker’s R&D team, bringing the total R&D staff up to 70.

“We are one of the first software vendors capable of offering automation integrating the three layers of cloud computing – software, infrastructure and platform solutions. With over 50 percent annual growth in the past five years, these ondemand services have been well adopted by companies around the world, and represent 40 percent of our sales revenue. The objective of the growth of our R&D team is to be further develop our leadership position in Cloud Computing
services and solutions, and to better meet the needs of our customers,” explained Jean-Michel Bérard, CEO and President of the Board of Directors, Esker.

Over 3,000 companies use Esker on Demand SaaS solutions, while 10 million monthly pages are handled worldwide by Esker’s mail, fax, email and SMS infrastructure.

Esker has three global data centres - in Australia, France and the United States - while six mail and fax production centres - in Australia, Spain, the United States, France, the United
Kingdom and Singapore - are equipped with colour digital printers, industrial folding and metering machines, dedicated lines for sending and receiving faxes, and other capabilities