Back at the helm

Had one of the worst days ever yesterday. Arrived back from vacation to discover I had not sent out last week's issue of DIR. I apologize for the electronic copies showing up a few days late. Also, I lost a chunk of e-mails from the week when I was gone. So, if you sent me anything important between Spetember 10 and the morning of Sept. 20, please re-send. I'm not going to try to explain how their deletion occurred, because I don't even know and I especially can't figure out how to get them back. And no, I never worked for Arthur Andersen, Martha Stewart, Microsoft, or Enron.

Anyhow, it's good to be back in the office and on the Document Imaigng beat. Looks like the exciting news continues to pour in and I promise to continue our first rate coverage.

Keep in touch.

Ralph

Veritas FileNET?

So, I just did this story on Veritas paying like for e-mail archiving specialist KVS. KVS's revenue in 2003 was one-tenth the acquisition price - which by the way was all cash. Talk about a deal for KVS! Good for those guys. They are one one of the oldest e-mail archiving products on the market, clearly saw the opporutnity early on and went for it. Their investors I'm sure made out like kings - as they only had like $37 million of venture funds in the thing.

Anyways, Veritas still has more than $2 billion on its balance sheet and runmors are they want to move further into ECM to better compete with EMC - which crossed over into Veritas' space with the acquistion of Legato last year. Now, if FileNET would just pull the trigger on this one, I think we'd have a winner...

JPEG suits news

If you didn't already see this on the PDFZone, check it out. Looks like Forgent is doing okay for itself with this bogus patent stuff.

News slowing down

Must have been an early rush of news this week as people got ready for their Labor Day vacations. Me, I'm taking my vacation in the middle of Sept, right when things start picking up again. Next year, I'm schedulign it for Aug.

Anyway, about the only thing making a lot of news consistently is Check 21 which is scheduled to go into effect in Oct. Here's a link to a great story on some of the effects it could have on the imaging industry. It's kind of obvious - more images, more people getting used to working with images, more need for imaging repositories - but the author puts in more elegantly. Check it out.

RG

Thanks and keep up the support

Hey, if you're here, thanks for comin' here and reading my Blog. And please feel free and even pressured to contribute. I'd like to see what someone else has to say and I'm sure others would too. Heck, I've got a newlsetter and write for magazines as well. I've got enough forums this one's yours...

A good sign for our industry that even though it's summer, the news keeps coming pretty good. Check out the Web page for several interesting news releases that have crossed my desk this week.

First one deals with Dicom's acquisition of Topccall. It seems like Kofax is entering the whole input/output realm that Jetform got started a number of years ago and many have since followed. Success has been mixed in this area, but people keep doing it and it seems momentum is slowly building. And Kofax paid like one time revenue.

The other real interesting deal is the Top Image Systems BKK installation. This seems like something close to a digital mailroom - at least the way ReadSoft and dakota have defined the market so far. Of course, we are sti ll waiting for Captiva's true Digital Mailroom stuff to be installed, and Reynolds has promised us four by the end of the year... we'll see.

Finally, Captiva's stock at least seems to be up greatly in recent days following their announcement of a deal with the IRS. Somebody on the Yahoo! message board has started the rumor that this could leader to bigger and better things with the IRS - which doesn't have a forms processing system for regular 1040s - but Captiva didn't say much to further this speculation - but it's nice to dream. Anyhow, Kofax tells me they have at least a couple of installations with the IRS as well - but of course, they don't handle high volumes as well as Captiva does so...

That's it for now.

Cheers.

RG