Visioneer-Xerox renew licensing deal

Scanner vendor Visioneer has renewed its brand licensing agreement with Xerox. First signed in 2003, the agreement" extends Visioneer’s current exclusive rights to develop, market and support the award-winning Xerox DocuMate line of Xerox-branded document scanners."

A relatively unique deal when it was first negotiated, Visioneer's partnership with Xerox has been a key growth driver for the Pleasanton, CA-based scanner vendor's business over the years. Perhaps due to the fact that it is using the Xerox brand, Visioneer has had a tremendous amount of success selling through Xerox sales channels. Here's a quote from an interview with former Visioneer VP of sales Bill Kouzi in 2009:

"The majority of our new sales now come through Xerox. We are now focused primarily on building
our relationships with the Xerox community. This includes focusing on Xerox enterprise accounts. We
are also focused on cultivating the Xerox channel, which includes Xerox Global Imaging, Xerox Global Services, Xerox Peak Resellers, and Xerox’s direct sales force. We have someone focusing on Xerox Canada and our business with Xerox in Latin America has grown tremendously...."'

So, obviously, the extension of the partnership for at least another five years, is an important event for Visioneer.

We first Tweeted about this announcement earlier this morning @DIREditor.

ReadSoft Reports $29 Million Quarter

The numbers for ReadSoft's first full quarter with foxray as part of the business are in. For Q2, the Swedish capture and workflow ISV reported the equivalent of around $29 million in U.S. dollars. This represented 25% overall growth from Q2 2011, 13% of which was organic. ReadSoft's operating profit was down slightly, to approximately $2.5 million.

Said CEO Per Åkerberg in a press release, "Our strong growth takes us back to black figures with regard to our EBITDA result, both for the quarter and the half-year. We are still not where we want to be in terms of results, but we believe that the investments we make in connection with the acquisition of foxray and in new product generations ensure good long-term growth. We have continued to work intensively with the integration of foxray and this is now essentially complete."

ReadSoft showed growth in all three of its major geographical markets, with the non-Nordic European market leading the way, thanks likely to foxray's established business in Germany.

Kofax Hits Q4 Projections; Dratler Back w/ Bish

Big day for Kofax. Couple of important announcements this morning. First, the Irvine-based document capture ISV seems to have hit the fourth-quarter numbers that CEO Reynolds Bish projected after a sluggish third-quarter. When the third-quarter results were announced, Bish had projected at least $69 million in revenue from Kofax's core capture business in fiscal Q4 (ended June 30), which would have represented 5% growth over Q4 2011.

According to the Kofax press release, "The Company ended the fiscal year with record total revenues in the range of $261 to $263 million and expects to report an EBITA of at least the $40.2 million realized during the previous fiscal year, both of which are in line with Company expectations previously communicated to the financial community."

There is a conference call scheduled for this morning. I'm on vacation and haven't had a chance to review the details yet, but, the London investment community seems to approve of the Kofax preliminary report. Kofax shares were up almost 5% in early trading. Of course, that could also be reflective of the news that Kofax has named Howard Dratler as its new EVP of field pperations. Dratler held a similar position at Captiva.

Bish probably would have liked to hire Dratler as his right-hand man when he first took over Kofax. In fact, here is a quote from Bish in our April 4, 2008 issue: “The new EVP position is pretty much identical to the
position I created at Captiva, for which I recruited Howard Dratler who had experience at Veritas. Howard is a very talented guy who did a very effective job. Unfortunately, he is not currently available."

At the time Dratler was occupied as the CEO of Anacomp and Bish hired former HP sales executive Alan Kerr to fill the EVP of field operations role. Kerr enjoyed mixed success, but Kofax seemed to recover more slowly from the 2009 economic downturn than many of its competitors and really didn't have a very strong first three quarters of its fiscal 2012.

Dratler was with Bish when he built Captiva from a company with market cap of less than $10 million to one he was able to sell to EMC for $300 million in a matter of three years. So, the Bish-Dratler combination clearly has a history of success in driving up investor valuation - which was Bish's main charge when he was hired by Kofax, and a goal I'm sure he is still working towards, as by my calculations at least, Kofax's current market cap of around $350 million is about the same as the Kofax (then known as Dicom) market cap when Bish was brought in.This unrealized goal of driving up the value of the company and the recent hire of Dratler would also indicate to me that the rumor circulating about Oracle buying Kofax has no substance behind it.

Psigen Completes Strong Fiscal 2012

Psigen has announced that it achieved 70% growth for its latest fiscal year, ending June 30. According to a press release, "Growth has come from a strong expanding domestic market, and significant growth in Europe and the Asia Pacific Region." Psigen is an Irvine, CA-based ISV that offers a versatile document capture software application.


On the additional strength of some OEM deals, Psigen had reported 90% growth for the six months ended Dec. 2011. Bruce Hensley, president of Psigen, said the new year was off to a good start with a strong July. He cited sales to large companies, including competitive replacements, as helping to drive Psigen's growth.

“In this past year, we brought on a large number of Fortune 500 clients who were looking to enhance their current capture application set and lower their total cost of ownership," said Hensley in a press release.

Kofax Mobile Early Wins

Back in March, at Kofax's annual Transform end user and reseller conference, we told you that the Irvine,CA-based Mobile Capture application was the hottest topic in town. It seems like some of that interest has already turned into business for Kofax, which today announced four Mobile Capture wins in a variety of markets. Three of the wins are with end users, in the areas of service, sales, and healthcare, and the fourth is a Mobile SDK sale to an ISV that will embed the technology in a transportation app for capturing shipping documents.

Said Drew Hyatt, SVP of Mobile Applications at Kofax, " We already have prospective users testing and evaluating Kofax Mobile Capture for mortgage applications, insurance claims, expense management, proof of delivery and accounts payable.”

Last year, while working for Harvey Spencer Associates, Dave Wood had published some fairly aggressive growth numbers for the mobile capture software market. He predicted the market to grow from a couple hundred million dollars in 2012 to more than $3 billion in 2018. Embedding the technology in other mobile apps was one of the key strategies for driving growth.

Canon Announces Print/Scan Mobile Apps

Canon has announced a pair of apps that enable users to scan to and print from their mobile phones and tablets utilizing ImageRunner MFPs. The apps are for the iOS and Blackberry operating systems.

From a press release, "The Canon Direct Print and Scan for Mobile application provides communication between Canon multifunction products (MFP) and an iPhone and iPad, allowing users to perform print and scan functions between the two devices, such as scanning from the MFP to an iOS device or printing from an iOS device to an MFP."


The iOS app is free at iTunes and will work with compatible ImageRunners and Image Runner ADVANCE devices. "Through the app users can remotely manage "scan options from an iOS device (e.g., select paper size selection, select scan resolution, duplex printing, color vs. black and white, select number of prints, collate and more)."


The app for Blackberries is also free and does basically the same things as the iOS app. It does require that users purchase a MEAP application to run on their hardware. (Go figure, a Blackberry app being more inconvenient than an Apple app....market dynamics are hard to change.) Canon seems to have an Android mobile app for scanning and printing photos but not yet for documents. Not sure why Blackberry was ahead of Android in the development cycle. Probably made sense when development started.

DIR on Twitter

Some, I'm totally new to this, so I apologize for anything I do that involves ironing the bumps out if you will, but just Tweeting my first message on Ralph Gammon @DIREditor. Does that give you enough info to find me? Tweet has to do with TIS' partnership with Saperion, announced today.
 
 Twitter seems like a great way to try and update you on some of the cool and interesting press release I get everyday, without have to set up a blog post on them.

Kofax Lands $2 Million Deal

During Kofax's third-quarter financials conference call, CEO Reynolds Bish certainly expressed confidence that the Irvine, CA-based document capture and BPM ISV would rebound strongly in the fourth quarter. A couple of large wins indicate that Bish's predictions may be on target. A little more than a week after announcing a $5 million sale to "an agency of the U.S. government [that] has selected Kofax for a large scale, nationwide capture project," Kofax has followed up by announcing a sale exceeding $2 million to "a top 10 global banking group headquartered in Western Europe."

The deal is an extension of a current Kofax implementation and includes Capture, Transform, and Monitor licenses. In addition to helping Kofax reach Bish's Q4 goal of $69 million in revenue from Kofax's "core capture business," the deal should help boost Kofax's European sales, which have been sluggish as of late.

TIS Scores Singapore Mailroom Deal

Earlier this week, Top Image Systems (TIS) announced it has "won an $855,000 project to deploy eFLOW® Digital Mailroom (DMR) at a public administration in Singapore. The solution will optimize and accelerate processing of all incoming documentation – free text and forms, paper and digital, estimated to reach a volume of tens of millions of documents annually."

According to Alex Toh, VP, Asia-Pac for TIS, the organization is "a long time customer of ours doing traditional big volume scanning and have recently been convinced that our DMR solution can further increase their efficiencies through automation and STP."

According to the press release, "The agency processes, audits and archives the 2-4 million forms and 8-16 million semi-structured and unstructured documents it receives each year, including letters, bills, statements of account, identity cards, etc. The project involves complex indexing and comprehension of unstructured documents written by people with different levels of command of the English language and from every walk of life. The DMR system will achieve document recognition rates of 90% for forms and 30% for semi-structured documents. The system is expected to go live in the first half of 2013."

This is the fourth significant announcement TIS has made in the last month regarding capture software sales. They have also announced a logistics win, a census win, and four significant European wins.

SaaS Features Highlighted in Kofax BPM

Kofax has announced a new version of its TotalAgility BPM software. Kofax is touting TotalAgility 6.0's ability to be deployed through a SaaS (software as a service) model. Kofax added TotalAgility when it acquired Northern Ireland-based ISV Singularity late last year. At the time, Kofax touted the ability of TotalAgility to be run as a SaaS, and the latest version seems to re-enforce that position.

According to the press release, "TotalAgility 6.0 has been also been enhanced to accelerate deployments through an intuitive process design and execution experience. TotalAgility Workspace and TotalAgility Builder are now completely browser-based, making it much easier for users to design, deploy and operate these solutions. Multiple form factors are also now supported, delivering better user experiences to mobile device users."

There is no mention of the introduction with cloud-based capture, which is something Kofax promised would be on the way, as part of TotalAgility - not as a standalone offering.

The SaaS version of TotalAgility runs on Windows Azure.

Fujitsu Releases New Portable ScanSnap

Fujitsu has released a new version of its popular mobile ScanSnap unit. The S1300i can capture "up to 12 double-sided color pages per minute (ppm), even while using its advanced intelligent image-processing technology...1.5 times faster than its predecessor." It also comes bundled with Scan to Android and Apple iOS capabilities through Fujitsu's ScanSnap Connect capabilities.

Connect still requires a laptop to act as an intermediary, but, utilizing the connect app, images can be automatically transferred from the laptop to a mobile device. Check out this video (the limited words are in Japanese, but you'll get the picture.) There is also improved scan-to-cloud and scan-to-folder capabilities. The device can be USB powered and continues with Fujitsu's tradition of ease-of-use for creating searchable PDF files through the ScanSnap product line.

Kofax Deal May Top Them All

The theme on our blog all week has been the preponderance of large capture software deals that have been announced recently. This included a $7.5 million Latin American deal by Brainware. Not sure if today's announced deal by Kofax is quite that large, but it is billed as being worth in the "mid-seven figure dollar amount" to Kofax. So, it's somewhere around a $5 million sale to U.S. government agency for a "large-scale nationwide capture project."

The sale includes a slew of  Kofax products, including KTM (Kofax Transformation Modules for intelligent data capture) and the Kofax Front Officer server for capture from MFPs. This is also a part of a trend of seven-figure MFP capture deals, as NSi and Nuance were each involved very large sales of MFP capture software last year. The NSi deal was also with a Federal government agency - the DoD.

Let's hope these trends continue.

info 360 re-brand

Apparently, going forward the combined info 360/On Demand event is going to be known as Content On Demand. Not a horrible name when you think about the content management technologies represented by the traditional AIIM community and printing/output stuff traditionally shown at On Demand. I guess the question comes down to, does anyone care about this event anymore? The only attendance number mentioned in the Questex press release about this year's info 360/On Demand event is the vague "thousands." (My observation is that it was definitely on the low-end of that scale.)

Regarding next year, "In the Spring of 2013, Content ON DEMAND will launch as a two-day sponsored conference focusing on the lifecycle of content from consumption through delivery."

Brainware, TIS Make More News

First there was the $7.5 million deal to increase its presence in Latin America, now Brainware has signed a deal with Content Concepts to distribute its software in the Asia-Pac region. A certified EMC parnter, Content Concepts, which is based in Singapore, advertises solutions in invoice/order processing, mailroom, and healthcare. They are the "only certified Brainware partner" in Asia-Pacific.

From the press release, "While Content Concepts will market Brainware’s applications for the automation of accounts payable operations initially, their long-term vision includes delivery of capture-driven efficiency across a number of vital back office processes."

TIS also announced another large deal today with a "one of Europe's largest logistics companies." The deal with worth $350,000 to TIS software will initially be deployed to process invoices for the company's German operations. TIS' eFlow capture software will be integrated with an SAP ERP system. From the press release, "In the second phase, the system will be expanded to the company’s other European locations. This growth-oriented enterprise also plans to expand to a fully automated Digital Mailroom solution."

These deals continue the strong momentum we have seen recently in the capture market. It's interesting to note that while both start with invoices/AP, both are talking about expanding into the wider capture market of digital-mailroom type solutions.

HP Article

I met with HP at the recent info 360 show, and Palo Alto-based technology giant really seemed to have lot of good stuff going on in the ECM market. This includes the recent release of its Capture and Route document scanning for MFP  solution, as well as improvements to the TRIM records management system to make it more enterprise-ready. Word is that some of the Autonomy search technology is now being incorporated in TRIM, and that the Cardiff (remember Cardiff Teleform?) capture platform is at least being considered. HP also had some nice refreshed scanners at its booth.

That said, we recently read in Brian Bissett's excellent MFP Report that HP is having all kinds of problems with the software for its popular Digital Sender network scanner and that a fix is not expected until this fall - a year after originally planned. Not sure how much of that is reflective of the macro issues at HP, but here is an excellent article from CNN that details some of the problems HP has been having. (It's a long one but well written.)

Here's an excerpt that talks about some of the struggles that technology developers at HP have faced as a result of cost cutting measures to improve HP's struggling bottom line: "Hurd's early initiatives to pare spending were valuable and necessary. But as time went on it became harder to find waste, and the results became extreme. Employees practically needed an act of Congress to get approval to buy a piece of software. The headquarters of the tech company did not have Wi-Fi. And some minions took Hurd's edicts to self-defeating lengths. At HP's office in Fort Collins, Colo., for example, the lights shut off automatically at 6 p.m. every day, effectively forcing workers to go home. An intrepid few brought their own lamps to the office, only to be scolded by facilities managers, who told them to remove the lights."

Yes, that's pretty harsh. I'll only say that, at least in our market, HP certainly has an impressive collection of technology, people, and services - with not only their own developed stuff, but acquisitions of Autonomy, Tower, and EDS contributing as well. I'd like to see HP figure it out, but I'm not sure how much dead weight it is carrying in the overall organization.