HSA Capture Follow-up

Just returning from Harvey Spencer's capture conference held up in Glen Cove on Long Island. Had a really nice time. There were about 40 attendees - with the likes of Adobe, Kodak, Fujitsu, Ricoh, AnyDoc, Datacap, Captaris, Cranel, PDI (the people that bought VisionShape), ISIS Papyrus, ABBYY, A2iA, IBM, Kofax, Captiva and a few others all attending. The conference covered several topics, including Java programming, check image quality (with a great presention from Frank Jaffe. Probably the most interesting session to me, perhaps because I was moderating it, was a racous panel discussion on when to use a digital copier for scanning and when to use a dedcated scanner. It seems most people in the traditional imaging industry still look down on the abilities of digital copier dealers to effectively sell document imaging technology - not to mention the capabilities of the hardware itself. Well, there were certainly a lot of opinions in the room. About the best conclusion I came to is that digital copiers seem to be posiioned for ad hoc scanning of a few pages at a time and no more - but with the trend toward distributed capture vs. centralized - this ad hoc stuff is making up a growing percentage of the market.

Speaking of ad hoc, Oracle had some fairly interesting collaboration and records management stuff they just came out with. They are positioned it as "content mangement for the masses" and have some starting price at like $60 per seat. Going after SharePoint it appears. And then Adobe's John Hoye was there marketing the companies' scanning toolkit for PDF creation. Just thought those are a couple more signs that this ad hoc market is going to start growing - and may and maybe already is taking business away from traditional imaging vendors. I'll leave it at that as I think I am starting to have a flashback to some of the shouting I heard at yesterday's panel.