ECM valuations on the rise

It looks like Open Text's stock value is up is up like 25%, based on a very strong finacial report. Open Text's income grew like 75%, after the company apparently successfully digested rival Hummingbird, which it acquired last year, which apparently has surprised some people. Vignette and EMC are also pretty close to their 52-week high. Of pulically traded ECM companies, only Interwoven, seems to be struggling a bit. This is interesting of course, when contrasted to capture vendors like Dicom and ReadSoft, who as we noted in our last post, are struggling a bit with their valuations. Of course, Belgian OCR/ICR/capture specialist I.R.I.S. is doing well, as is Nuance. Take it all for what it's worth, but to us it seems ECM is up, basic capture is down, transactional capture is up (This view is of course, based on much more than these stock prices - in fact, it's a lot based on stuff that's appeared in DIR over the past few months.)

Cheers.

Ralph

Dicom-ReadSoft report results

A couple of European-based capture specialists recently reported their results of the period ending June 30. For ReadSoft, the period represents the first half of 2007; For Dicom, it's a year-end report for fiscal 2007. ReadSoft reported a strong second quarter with 11% growth, leading to 9% growth through the first six months of 2007. Dicom, meanwhile, reported a flat 12 months of sales, with a slight increase in profitability. Interestingly, although Dicom's Kofax subsidiary is often recognized as the capture market leader, ReadSoft's "transactional-based" processing applications are where Dicom wants to go. Also, it's probably worth noting that ReadSoft does its busienss primarily in Europe, where the Euro is now much stronger than it was against the dollar a couple years ago, while Kofax still does the majority of its business in the U.S. So, a combination of that and the devaluation of the batch capture applicaitons where Kofax reigns sumpreme has hurt its business. Interestingly, maybe because expecations were set low enough, Dicom's stock doesn't seem to have been negatively affected by the year-end financial announcement.

Ralph

SOX Musical Comedy Spot

Click on the MMVI picture. Apparently this video was made by billionaire business man Sam Zell, who makes a musical comedy video about economics (yes, a musical comedy video about economics) ever year. This year, he rips apart Sarbanes-Oxley. Pretty amusing.

First post of fall

Got the kids off to school today. Much quieter around here. Hopefully will leave me more time (and energy) to blog. Preparing to travel to the annual HSA Capture Conference next week. There I will be presenting on the top seven news trends of 2007, which got me thinking about two themes in particular:
1. The changing Interface of distribtued capture
2. The adoption of invoice processing - as outlined in my last issue, there are like some 500 North American installations of invoice capture, I'm guessing like a 1,000% increase over three years ago.

Distributed capture and invoice processing are two trends that we talked about a lot of years that have both now become an increasing reality. So, I guess there is some value to this speculation that we run in DIR.

Optical scan voting

I've always loved when document scanning is employed in voting and still strongly think that we should use more of it, because of the foolproof paper tails.