TIS-J&B Team Up

Israel-based forms processing specialist Top Image Systems has signed on a J&B Software as a U.S. reseller. J&B is one of the largest software vendors in the remittance processing space. After a couple of earlier tries, TIS has been biding its time before making another run at the U.S. market. J&B seems like a solid partner, and we hope this deal works out for both of them. We still expect another bigger move by TIS this year as the company strives to achieve its goal of $30 million in revenue in 2007, after hitting its $20 million goal last year.

Document Fraud Prevention

This is an interesting story about document fraud protection technology - basically used to prevent people from reproducing documents that shouldn't be reproduced.

Lason

Couple interesting things related to the Lason deal:
1. We reported in July 2004 that investment firm Charterhouse Goup bought Lason, a $140 million company for something like $30 million and the assumption of some senior indebtedness. According to the HOV Services press release, it paid $148 million for the company. On the surface that seems like a nice deal for Charterhouse. Maybe that's why these guys are going private.
2. Also, former Lason President John Messigner was sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay $20 million in restitution for his part in the finacial scam that artificially ran up Lason's stock price in the late 1990s.

ACS Going Private

ACS is the latest oursourcer to go private. Seems to be some sort of trend. First Lason, then SourceCorp, then the biggest one of them all. I can understand that Lason was in dire straits and SourceCorp, was exactly blowing the market out of the water, but ACS has been pretty darn successful on the public market over the past five years. What's the motivation for going private? I read the same thing about another technology-driven industry recently - that a lot of the pubic companies were expected to go private. Is is that the market is so volitile right now?

Oh yes, speaking of Lason, it was recently acquired by an Indian BPO specialist.

Dicom Chairman

Dicom has hired a new non-executive Chairman. Interesting because he's a U.K. guy and also has a high-growth background. High-growth is interesting because Rob Klatell, the new CEO, at least he was new last year, also came from a company with a fairly aggressive growth strategy. Dicom has historically not been that overly aggressive. Also, the company was founded by Swiss and now it has an American CEO and English Chair. Of course, it's stock is traded on the London Exchange and has been for some time.

Regards,

Ralph

Ricoh reorg

Seems to make sense. Focusing their channels a bit. Anybody that does major acquistions like Ricoh has over the years typically needs to make some major moves into order to digest them. So far, Ricoh had avoided these moves. Sometimes it can be a tough pill to swallow for those affected, but such is big busienss.

Open Text Buys Federal Reseller

It seems Open Text has acquired one of its resellers that focuses on the federal government market. Four million for a 50-employee company that is familiar with your product line seems like a pretty good deal.

Intel e-mail mismanagement

This may or may not be the case the ZyLab is inovlved with.

Datacap Parascript form partnership

Automated data capture specialist Datacap, out of Tarrytown, NY, has officially announced a partnership with recognition specialist Parascript. Parascript, which was originally founded in Russia as part of the Glasnost initiative, is now based in Boulder, CO. It's claim to fame and biggest source of revenue is a contract with the USPS for reading addresses on envelopes. Parascript is noted for its ability to recognize cursive writing and has done a couple of installations with Datacap already involving hand-filled order forms for the Baltimore Sun and TV Guide. Parascript appears to be moving forward after a proposed merger with pubically traded Mitek fell through. Both Mitek and Parascript have strong technology in the check recognition market.

ZyLab system being used to support one of the Nation’s largest technology antitrust cases.

From a ZyLab press release:

ZyLAB and Marin IT Provide 65+ Law Firms and Attorney Generals with Web-Based eDiscovery Solution

ZyIMAGE Used to Collaborate in High-Profile California Technology Antitrust Case; System Currently Holding Five Million Case Documents

Vienna, VA, March 6, 2007 – ZyLAB, an innovative developer of Information Access Solutions and Marin IT, a leading provider of networking and application development solutions, today announced that the ZyIMAGE eDiscovery solution is currently in use to support one of the Nation’s largest technology antitrust cases. More than 65 law firms and 14 different Attorneys General are using the hosted application to collaborate on the documents produced by the defendants during the discovery process. In use already for 18 months, the ZyLAB/Marin IT eDiscovery solution allows lawyers to access data in real time and search on topics that have been discovered during depositions.

“This case has produced millions of pages of evidence that our clients must have access to in order to prosecute and prove our case,” said David Cooper of Marin IT. “The ZyLAB/Marin IT solution has dramatically streamlined their ability to locate the information they need in near real time, thus improving overall efficiency. There are hundreds of people working together on this case and without this solution it would have been quite a laborious and difficult process. This hosted eDiscovery solution should serve as a model of excellence for the legal world.”

ZyIMAGE eDiscovery enables organizations to capture, investigate, structure and disclose information in a simple, secure and efficient manner. Built on an XML data repository, the solution provides users with tools to store, search and retrieve vital information through a standard Internet browser. Marin IT is hosting the ZyIMAGE application/Web interface for the users at a data center in Northern California. Connected to the server which is running the application are large disk arrays holding approximately 5,000,000 case documents. Marin IT has installed ssl certificates on the Web server in order to deliver the content in a secure way using https/ssl.

Prior to using this implementation, all of the discovery documents for the cases were delivered in hard copy and then reviewed by the different lawyers and Attorneys General. As the “hot documents” were found they would then be added to a list and copies put into binders and sent via mail around the county for the different law firms to work with. There was no full text search ability, and there was no way to have central repository of data that everyone could use to share the data. As the case has progressed, the deposition summaries and transcripts have been added to a deposition index to make this information available to everyone involved.

“The key motivation for users engaged in eDiscovery is not to miss any archived e-mail, paper document, or electronic file that may have relevance to the case,” said Dr. Johannes Scholtes, President of ZyLAB. “Therefore, eDiscovery searching must concentrate 100 percent on recall rather than on precision. ZyIMAGE eDiscovery empowers users in the antitrust case to find the information they are looking for in seconds and provides sophisticated tools such as hit-highlighting, hit-navigation, customizable relevance ranking, optimized user interaction, text-mining and visualization.”

Attorneys General from Arkansas, California, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Washington and a variety of law firms Nationwide are working on this case and have real-time access to the system.

Scientigo

Remember Scientigo, the guys who said they had the patents on XML and were using the technology to do some advanced classifcation and extraction - in fact, they even signed partnerships with Boeing subsidiary CDG, as well as Canon MEAP partner Ribstone - well, it seems they are out of the ECM and capture business these days and focusing on phone directories. This comes after a change of CEOs late last year.

Ralph

Some of the latest news

Tim Corkery has been named the COO of eCopy. He had been at eCopy for seven years and was previously from senior vice president, worldwide sales and services...Bill Gates Kodak Document Imaging's former GM and VP of sales for US&C, has left the organization... Kofax recently announced a Scan Server installation with Randolph Brooks Credit Union. The implimentation facilitates the remote capture of loan related documentation from branch offices.