BancTec Lands Deal With IRS

BancTec, the Dallas-based payment and document capture specialist announced it has won a deal for 13 high-speed scanners with the IRS through Northrop Grumman. The scanners will be used in the IRS' four corporate returns processing centers, as well as a test center. BancTec's IntelliScan devices are open track scanners that feature in-line OCR, bar-code reading, and sorting capabilties and can process seveal hundred pages per minute.

IAPP-TAWPI Capture Conference Moved

I apologize for any confusion created by my previous e-mailer, which listed the annual TAWPI Document Capture Conference as still taking place in December. In the wake of the TAWPI's merger with the International Accounts Payable Professionals (IAPP) organization last year, the event has been moved, both physically and the date, and the focused tightened.

The new date and place is February 7-9, 2011, at the Omni Dallas Hotel Park in Dallas. The new focus is financial document mangement. According to Tom Bohn, CEO of IAPP, the changes were made to "breathe new life" into the event, which suffered a down year last year. More details in our next premium issue of DIR.

KLake Named to Inc. 5000

Congratulations to imaging-for-SharePoint ISV and specialist KnoweldgeLake for being named to the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing comapnies in America.

From the press release:
"KnowledgeLake has experienced 312% revenue growth since 2007. It has experienced growth and profit every year, has had zero job cuts and continues to grow with a conservative focus. KnowledgeLake added over 300 new customers in 2009, has over two million licensed users in 35 countries, and its products ship in 11 languages."

We've heard great things about KnowledgeLake's growth from the company's executives and this helps validate it. A lot people think KnowledgeLake is going to be facing some stiffer competition as everyone else in the market is jumping with both feet into the SharePoint space. However, KnowledgeLake, which has been the leader in imaging-for-SharePoint solutions pretty much since it was founded, has a 5-year head start, including a really good understanding of SharePoint 2010 and how it can be used as a fairly powerful platform on which to build imaging and document management solutions. In other, we expect this growth to continue at least into the near future.

--Ralph

Correction to DIR Article on eGistics & Peladon

In last week's (Aug. 6) issue I ran a story about eGistics teaming with Peladon to win a large health insurance claims processing contract with a major BPO (presumed by me to be ACS) with a large state Medicaid organization (believed by me to be California.) Note: Peladon and eGistics are under NDAs, and the names that I've named are speculation by me based on the timing of the ACS contract with Calilfornia and the volumes - which are 1.5 to 2 million claims per month - not per year, as I reported in DIR. Sorry about the mistake.

IBM Acquires Datacap

In kind of a surprising move, Big Blue has picked up document and automated data capture ISV Datacap, for an undisclosed amount. Why is this a surprise? Well, because everyone thought Kofax was the natural target for IBM. Kofax, after all, has had an OEM agreement with FileNet (which was acquired by IBM in 2006) since 2005. And Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish had sold his previous company, Captiva, to IBM/FileNet's big ECM competitor EMC.  But, it was not to be. (at least not yet???)

Datacap, it's worth noting, had a relationship with FileNet going back to 2002 (see story on page 8). I remember Datacap CEO Scott Blau being somewhat miffed by the OEM agreement with Kofax. But he always maintained that the relationship with FileNet/IBM remained strong. I guess that proved to be the case.

Maybe coincidentally, Datacap and IBM are headquartered about 15 miles from each other, just north of New York City.

Just last week, ReadSoft's Bob Fresneda was telling us that he expected more consolidation in the industry, so there must have been rumors floating about.

The deal makes sense if you look at Datacap's legacy business, which was primarily larger accounts with complex data capture requirements - technology IBM clearly did not have. Recently, Datacap had begun marketing some mid-market invoice/unstructured forms capture stuff targeted at the channel. We're not sure that will fit in with IBM's goals.

Paradatec, another advanced data capture specialist that has partnered with IBM worldwide, could also suffer some fallout from this.

More later.