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Friday, April 29, 2011

PBMS Partners With EMC Captiva

Pitney Bowes Management Services (PBMS) has signed a deal to utilize EMC's Captiva software for both its on-premise and hosted document capture solutions. PBMS is the $1.2 billion outsourcing arm of Pitney Bowes, Inc. It focuses on mailroom and document services for large, Global 1000 organizations.

Last year, we did an article (go to page 7) on PBMS's partnership with Omtool to increase its breadth of on-premise capture offerings. At the time, PBMS, which certainly does a lot of work around outgoing mail was focused on expanding its presence in records management and document processing. The partnership with EMC appears to be another move in that direction.

8 comments:

Cody said...

Wow, there are so many other capture products, I really wonder if PB took the time to compare Captiva against Kofax, Psigen, AnyDoc...basically any of the other players.

What are your thought?

DIReditor said...

EMC Captiva is a decent product. I'm not sure PBMS got hooked up EMC, but I'm trying to set up an interview. They also partner with eCopy, Omtool, and IPRO, so they appear open to working with multiple ISVs. I'm assuming maybe customer introduced them, as they deal with a lot of large entities - the type which have historically utilized Captiva.

BrianHall said...

Hi Norm

Awesome blog! As a comment, have you personally installed and setup Captiva?

DIReditor said...

Norm? It's Ralph. But anyhow, no, I have not installed and set-up Captiva? Why do you ask? Thanks.

BrianHall said...

Ralph, I am very sorry...some reason I had Norm on the brain??

The reason I ask is that you commented Captiva is a "decent" product. When grading a software product I thought a major consideration would be the configuraiton\implementation and support that the product has. Captiva is a pain to setup and EMC's support is a joke. Just curious why you feel it is decent? Thanks in advance for you thoughts.

DIReditor said...

Brian:

Basically, I talked to people in this industry every day and have for more than 10 years. While I certainly received quite a bit of negative feedback on FormWare over the years, it was still used by quite a few people - which says something because there have always been choices. The reviews around on EMC's InputAccel platform have been more positive- of course it doesn't necessarily involve any automated data capture. The reviews I've heard on EMC's SWT technology, which does data capture as part of IA, have been less positive.

Anyhow, I also received quite a bit of feedback on a Wirpo report sponsored by EMC that compared their techonlogy to Kofax's. Most people, including several non-EMC experts, seem to think it was well researched and written, and the report says some positive things about the Captiva platform - www.emc.com/whycaptiva.

Take some time and read it if you get a chance. Like many products, EMC Captiva has certain stengths and weaknesses, I think, and for whatever reason, which I hope to find out, PBMS must have felt it met its specific needs. If they switch vendors a couple years down the road, we'll know it maybe didn't work out.

Matt said...

As a Captiva and Kofax partner, I can assure you that Captiva is no more difficult to install and support than Kofax. Captiva is actually quicker to get up and running install-wise. Batch or process creation may be *slightly* easier with Kofax, but Captiva allows more flexibility/customization.

They each have there issues and strong points.

Anonymous said...

Kofax and Captiva, Kofax is built on a toolkit written by EMC Captiva