Why not Bundle Textract with a Network Scanner?

I was doing an interview recently with a scanner vendor which was planning on introducing a new SOHO model, for which they expected Amazon to serve as the primary marketplace. Amazon sells a lot of document scanners. This got me thinking, why not bundle some AWS Textract services with scanners being sold through Amazon?

Introduced in 2018 and released for general availability last year, Amazon describes Textract as a "service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents." What more could you ask for with a document scanner? There are different flavors of Textract, from full-page OCR and layout recognition, to forms extraction, to table extraction. Here is a link to an article I did on Textract in 2019, and here's a link to Amazon's Textract site. Did I mention Textract is cheap?

One drawback to Textract, which we have discussed, is that unless a user specifically requests that their images are deleted, Amazon basically reserves the right to utilize them going forward to improve Textract, as well as "other Amazon machine-learning/artificial-intelligence technologies." That can be a non-starter for some, but adoption of the bundled service would be optional or a vendor could limit the bundling of AWS OCR services to single SKU.

So, if I am a scanner vendor, why wouldn't I look at including a year's worth of Textract services with the purchase of the scanner from the Amazon marketplace? Maybe the issue is that Textract is more of an AWS/B2B play than a B2C play like you get more commonly with the Amazon marketplace. But, for a vendor selling their scanners to the SOHO market, maybe there's a fit. And I'm not sure if Amazon works like this, but could you think of a better way to get good positioning with the world's largest e-tailer than supporting one of their up and coming AWS services initiatives, which are a major growth area for Amazon?

So, my proposition is for a scanner vendor to create a SKU, probably for some type of scanner with a network connection, that offers a free year of Textract Services. Amazon already offers a three-month free tier of Textract, so introducing some sort of trial with a scanner would not be that much of a stretch for them.  If anyone does take advantage of this idea, if you'd just give me credit, I'd appreciate it.

Lasefiche EMPOWER Event Continues to Grow

LONG BEACH, CA – It was good to return to the Laserfiche EMPOWER Conference this year after a three-year hiatus. Last time I had the opportunity to attend was 2012. I had planned to go in 2013, but a snowstorm changed that. 

Since that 2012 event, I haven't really had a chance to connect with the Laserfiche executive team. And there have been big changes to that team over that time. In 2013, Tom Wayman, VP of marketing and product strategy, died. The next year, his mother and company founder and CEO Nien-Ling Wacker passed away. (Both had awards named after them that were presented at this year's conference.) Nien-Ling's husband Chris Wacker has taken over as CEO, with CTO Karl Chan having added president to his title. In 2014, Laserfiche named Thomas Phelps IV as its VP of corporate strategy and marketing.

During the last few years, Laserfiche has continued to grow. For the 2012 conference, which was held at the Anaheim Marriott, I reported 1,600 people attended. For this year's event, which was moved to the Long Beach Convention Center (a much bigger venue), Laserfiche announced 2,700 attendees. Chris Wacker also told me the company enjoyed 10-12%  revenue growth in 2015 over 2014, which was also a growth year.

Overall, 880 organizations were represented at EMPOWER. This included a mix of end users, resellers, and vendor partners. The big announcement was the release of Laserfiche 10, which features improvements in collaborative and mobile capabilities, as well as the introduction of a library of more than 100 pre-built workflows across several vertical markets and horizontal applications. New analytics tools for BPM were also introduced.

A few things that have not changed in the four years since I last attended EMPOWER:

1. Laserfiche remains very strong in state and local government market.
2. There is still a big push toward getting many of these government customers to expand their implementations enterprise wide. It seems to be working. For example, I attended a presentation by the City of Boca Raton, which has expanded its implementation from the clerk's office to the A/P department and now has 50 more projects either currently being implemented or that have been requested. Many of the attendees I spoke with were considering similar (if not quite as big) expansions.
3. Epson is still the event's premier sponsor, although Epson's scanner business has grown considerably since 2012. According to Mark Pickard, senior product manager, Document Scanners, Epson America (citing numbers from the NPD group) through the first 11 months of 2015, the company's revenue from commercial scanners grew 24% over 2014, which was twice as fast as Epson's nearest competitor. He credited Epson's relationship with Laserfiche and its channel as contributing to that growth.

We'll have more detailed coverage of the event in our next newsletter, but that's a quick summary for you.

Kofax, QAI, SPAs - Did They Help Fix Healthcare.gov?

This summer Kofax announced a $7M deal with a government agency that was among the biggest in company's history. It included more than $4M in software license revenue and $3.5M for four years of prepaid software maintenance. The deal was to a government agency and was sold through federally-focused Fulton, MD-based systems integrator and conversion services provider Quality Associates, Inc. (QAI).

At Kofax's recent Transform Conference, QAI was recognized by Kofax with its Award for Partner Deal of the Year. A few more details surrounding the customer came out. "The overall contract will help a government healthcare agency manage efforts related to enrolling uninsured citizens in state insurance exchanges, as mandated by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – millions of paper and electronic applications and other documentation are received, reviewed and verified for completeness and eligibility, and processed in an environment that protects applicants’ personal information."

QAI is presenting this as a First Mile implementation leveraging Kofax's Smart Process Application technology. Of course, this is exactly what I was calling for as I was going through my personal experience trying to sign up for a new healthcare plan at US Government Web site. At least it appears we are all on the same page now, which may have something to do with the sharp decrease in complaints we've heard recently about the onboarding process.

I.R.I.S. Partners with Scytl to Create Document Imaging Systems for Elections

I.R.I.S. recently made an interesting announcement about a partnership with Scytl, which develops election management and voting systems. I.R.I.S., which is now owned by Canon Europe, is a developer of document imaging and automatic recognition/data extraction software. The companies recently got together and successfully completed election projects in Ecuador and Honduras.

From the press release, "Scytl looked for a company that could prove efficient extraction technology to complement their offering for the Ecuadorian elections 2013. The request encompassed supporting the election specific process where: the voting slips were gathered in the polling stations and grouped into reports. These were then scanned and processed in a decentralized scenario in 105 scanning centers. With I.R.I.S.’ advanced extraction technologies, Scytl was able to capture the election results from the reports automatically."

The reason this partnership interests me so much is because of what I, and several other people, consider to be security concerns associated with electronic voting systems installed in many states in the U.S.A. that don't produce any paper records. Due to my experience with document imaging, I don't understand why we don't utilize scanners, like Scytl is apparently doing with the help of I.R.I.S.' technology. A couple years, OMR technology was tried in the NYC area, but several glitches occurred. Perhaps Scytl, which seems to have successfully pulled off two Latin American elections with I.R.I.S.' help can bring its technology North.

Spigraph Acquires Dicom-Initial Thoughts

In what is being billed as a merger of Europe's top two value-added distributors (VAD) in the document capture space, Spigraph has acquired Dicom. Spigraph, based in France was founded in 1997 and has been expanding rapidly in recent years after taking on some venture capital in 2011. Dicom, which was founded in 1991, acquired the ISV Kofax in 1999 and then was spun off by Kofax in 2011.

When we talked last year with Dicom executives last year in the wake of the appointment of former software executive Rudolf Gessinger as chairman, they positioned a then recent announcement of a partnership between Kofax and Spigraph as non-threatening to Dicom's business. The Dicom execs positioned ALOS (which had been acquired by Spigraph and expanded at VAD's presence significantly in Dicom stronghold's Switzerland and Germany) as primarily in the systems integration business and Spigraph as stronger as a VAD in geographical regions like France, where Dicom was not particularly strong.

This absence of overlap was reenforced in a quote from Joe Froning, CEO of Dicom International, which appeared in the recent press release announcing the merger with Spigraph, "Even though our two companies have been working on the same markets until now, the geographical and functional areas that have overlapped are minimal," he said. "This merger therefore represents a uniting of our respective forces."

Froning will stay with the company as Senior Vice President of Dicom/Spigraph Distribution.Wayne Davey, previously CEO of Spigraph, becomes CEO of the group. The group’s head office will be at Spigraph’s headquarters in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier.

The press release lists the combined company's turnover as €130 million, or approximately $175 million. In its final full fiscal year as part of Kofax (ended June 30, 2010), Kofax reported $125 million was generated from its hardware distribution business. When Spigraph acquired Swiss-German document imaging systems integration specialist ALOS in 2011, the combined entity's revenue was listed at over $65 million. So, there has apparently been erosion in revenue in the past couple years, which is not surprising considering the state of the scanner market today, which is how VADs have historically generated the majority of their revenue.

As prices and margins continue to drop on scanners and related service contracts, VADs, especially in more mature markets like North America and Western Europe, have had to look to new avenues to generate revenue. (Although VADs in emerging markets like the Middle East, such as Forefront Technologies seem to still be growing at a healthy rate.) Gessinger's software background is what made him attractive to the Dicom board, which brought him in. And, Spigraph, through its acquisition of ALOS, has a systems integration practice that helps further diversify that its offerings, which is a good thing.

Between the two organizations, Spigraph and Dicom will now cover a good portion of EMEA, including both mature and developing countries, with a single entity, that offers a combination of document capture-related hardware and software sales, support, and professional services. This variety and geographical infrastructure, along with the resources of a 400-person entity, should make the organization a more valuable asset to resellers and end users, as well as create more profits, than either company would be able achieve on its own.

Cool Stitching Feature in Kodak Alaris-HTI EOB Offering

Yesterday, Kodak Alaris announced it has teamed up with HTI Healthcare to offer an explanation of benefit (EOB) solution. The solution basically involves healthcare providers and third-party bill payers utilizing Kodak scanners and Capture Pro Software to feed HTI's system--which is a cloud-based EOB processing service. HTI then returns relevant extracted data to the providers and billers, along with - get this - "fully indexed patient claim 'stitched' images—a single image showing only the needed patient claim record, including all required EOB header information to identify the payer. Stitched images are a vast improvement over the outdated redaction process that left large gaps in the content of the document." We thought that was pretty cool. Bottom line is that it's good to see continued improvements in the evolving paper EOB processing market. 

Kofax: A Go-To Partner for MS in SPA

A couple weeks ago, Kofax announced it would make an insurance claims processing solution available for demonstration as part of an engagement at Microsoft Technology Centers (KTC) worldwide. Here's our blog post discussing that announcement. It mainly focuses on Kofax's moving its technology to a cloud environment.

We were also wondering how significant this was regarding Kofax's relationship with Microsoft. Here's the reply we received from Dermot McCauley, VP, solutions product marketing, for Kofax: "The Kofax Agile Claims demonstration supports the Microsoft partnership by providing innovative technologies that allow us to offer a more complete customer solution and meet their customer’s exact needs. These resources shorten the time required to develop a customer demonstration by removing traditional barriers and reduces the total cost of solution acquisition while providing compelling customer value. Drawing on the integrated innovation of Kofax Total Agility, the Microsoft Technology Center can be a powerful resource for customer organizations.  

"Additionally, the KTA offering potentially influences Microsoft licensing including Azure, Dynamics, SQL Server, SharePoint, O365, Exchange, Lync, and Bing. As we continue to roll-out this demonstration globally, Microsoft team members in the field will look to Kofax as a leading provider of smart process applications for the business critical First Mile of customer interactions."

It seems as if he is trying to position Kofax as a go-to partner for MS in the SP space. That's not a bad thing.

Partnerships Take Technology into new Geographies

This week both NovoDynamics and KnowledgeLake announced interesting partnerships that will help them expand into new geographical markets. In conjunction with the recent GITEX show, held in Dubai, Novo, a recognition technology specialist, announced that ForeFront Technologies, a VAD that focuses on the Middle East and Africa, will be carrying its OCR software. KnowledgeLake, which develops software for document image-enabling Microsoft SharePoint, announced that PFU will be introducing its technology into PFU's ECM practice in Japan.

Novo, which first came onto our radar screen because of its Arabic OCR technology (it currently supports Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and English languages as well), exhibited at GITEX. "This show covers all areas of IT and expects over 140,000 visitors before the week is over," reported Art Nichols, Novo's VP of Global Sales, who attended the event. "Forefront is a large Fujitsu and Kodak distributor that also sells Kofax and now NovoDynamics NovoVerus."

Georges Mehchi, CFO and Managing Partner for ForeFront sounded pretty excited about the partnership. As quoted in a press release,  “The intelligence that NovoDynamics has built into NovoVerus’ software truly raises the bar for language detection, recognition and data extraction, taking Arabic and multilingual OCR to an unparalleled level! Introducing this technology into Middle Eastern and African markets will be life changing, not only for Arab nations, but globally.”

 The KnowledgeLake-PFU partnership was a natural, seeing how the ISV is now a wholly owned subsidiary of PFU. Said Ron Cameron, president of KnowledgeLake in a press release, "“This natural progression of our partnership with PFU will extend their already successful ECM practice to include SharePoint ECM. As SharePoint continues to gain momentum in the Japanese marketplace, we hope this partnership promotes the profile and perception of Microsoft’s platform by providing value around its robust ECM capabilities. We are grateful for this opportunity and I couldn’t think of a more suiting partner in this effort than our parent company, PFU."

I don't think there is any question that we are truly working in a global economy today. Yes, there are certainly hurdles to be cleared to be successful doing business in multiple countries, but working with strong partners, like the ones that NovoDynamics and KnowledgeLake have chosen, represents a great way to clear these hurdles.

EPM and Crowley Announce Partnership

Eastman Park Micrographics (EPM), the media and equipment business that was spun out of Kodak DI in 2011, this week announced a partnership with the Crowley Company, which will provide worldwide sales and marketing for EPM's equipment line, which currently includes the IMAGELINK Archive Writer, the IMAGELINK Archive Processor, as well as a pair of OEM'd film to image scanners.

Technically, Crowley's partnership is with EPM Equipment, which was spun off of EPM this week as well. EPM will continue to sell media/film through its agreement with Agfa. Apparently, the Rochester-based Kodak film production operations, where EPM historically got its film, are winding down.

We'll have more in depth coverage of these announcements in our next DIR premium issue, which is due out Aug. 23.

Hyland Acquires AnyDoc

Well this is one that might have occurred 10 years ago...Document imaging-centric ECM ISV Hyland Software has acquired AnyDoc Software. It's always been a good fit, as both companies have sold primarily through reseller channels and certainly have complimentary technology. Hyland and AnyDoc, in fact, share several channel partners who integrate AnyDoc's capture on the front end with Hyland's ECM on the back.

A couple years ago, Hyland made a move to go more aggressively after the capture space and even introduced some proprietary invoice capture technology that was designed to leverage its OnBase repository's integration with line of business systems. On top of that, there were rumors that Hyland was doing a fairly efficient job replacing AnyDoc capture technology with its own capture at some of the customer sites of Hershey Systems- a higher education integrator that Hyland acquired in 2010. But, our question for Hyland has always been, "Why re-invent the wheel when there is already a market full of great capture software out there?"

Of course, all that should be under water under the bridge now, as AnyDoc and its mature and proven capture technology are now part of Hyland.

Back in the mid-1990's, AnyDoc was one of the pioneers in automated data capture from documents. And, in the late 1990s, it was about the same size as Hyland. Since then, Hyland has grown to more than $230 million in annual revenue (per a recent article in the Plain Dealer), while our estimates have AnyDoc still at under $20 million. The reasons for this are likely multiple, but one definitely is that Hyland has done a much better job cultivating and growing its channel than AnyDoc has.

For example, while AnyDoc was one of the pioneers in automated invoice capture, it decided to go primarily direct with the initial version of its invoice capture software because it felt the technology was too complex for its reseller channel at the time. You can imagine the conflict that created. Meanwhile, while Hyland has introduced some direct sales into its mix, it's also done a good job moving upstream and really securing a lot of the top resellers in the document/imaging workflow space.

The synergies between the two companies should be great. AnyDoc's software, which was never its weakness, will now be available to the entire Hyland channel. Plus, Hyland larger support and development team will be able to help it move forward. In fact, there are already some ex-AnyDoc employees working for Hyland. Hyland gets a mature and robust capture product, which should only assist with their efforts in the ECM space - where leaders like Documentum, Open Text, and IBM, have also acquired capture ISVs.

Dicom and KLake Partnership Paying Early Dividends

Sounds like Dicom's partnership with KnowledgeLake is off to a good start. Today, the European value-added document imaging distributor "reports a consistently growing demand for products and solutions from KnowledgeLake Inc." [Click for press release.] The companies have been working together for almost a year. It was at last year's Sept. DMS show that Dicom announced it would act as KnowledgeLake's distributor for the EMEA territory.

KnowledgeLake is an ISV that specializes in software for document imaging enabling SharePoint. It has grown its U.S. business primarily through direct sales and a handful of resellers. The EMEA business is being pushed primarily through Dicom's extensive reseller channel. KnowledgeLake had one of the first software products added to the Dicom porfolio in the wake of the distributor's splitting with Kofax.

According to today's press release, "Since September 2011, DICOM was successful in closing a whole series of KnowledgeLake partnership agreements with system integrators in Germany, Switzerland, the UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Nigeria and South Africa and managed to win a significant number of projects throughout EMEA. In addition, DICOM also reports a strong pipeline for the month ahead."

According to Joachim Froning, CEO and co-owner of DICOM, "We have been able to draw to the attention of system integrators and VARs in the ECM- as well as the MS SharePoint and Dynamics space to KnowledgeLake. Amongst already signed partnership agreements are renowned integrators like SP Integration, COI, Data One, Sword, Informed Consulting, Innobit, Intervate, FOXit, iSPartners, Infographic and ProActive, just to name a few."

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.

Research Firm Finds $6 Payback for Every $1 Spent on ECM

Nucleus Research recently analyzed 37 case studies of ECM users and found an average ROI of $6.12 for every dollar spent on ECM technology. Nucleus presented its number at Digitech's recent reseller conference held at Denver's Inverness Conference Center. Digitech is a leading SaaS-based provider of ECM technology through its ImageSilo offering and also delivers on premise capture and ECM through its PaperVision line of products.

Nucleus' study found that second and third generation systems "deliver increasing ROI through more streamlined processes and greater productivity." From the Nucleus press release on the study, "In the analysis of Nucleus case studies, 62% of all returns came from direct benefits such as reduced paper or avoidance of staff or service bureau costs.  Another 38% of returns came from indirect benefits, such as productivity."

I was honored to be asked to present at the Digitech event. My presentation was entitled "News You can Use: Staying Ahead in a Rapidly Evolving Market." Basically, I encouraged VARs to embrace new technologies and selling techniques as we enter the "knee of the curve," as Ray Kurzweil calls it in his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines." I also reviewed my biggest stories of 2011 and tried to explain how I felt these stories are going to be affecting the market going forward.

Digitech made an interesting capture software announcement at the event. It released its new PaperVision Capture Desktop, which is a batch capture application to compete with Kofax Express and Kodak Capture Pro. The main difference is that Digitech is not increasing the price of Capture Desktop when it is run with higher volume scanners. The new product lists for $599 and is available exclusively through Cranel. More on this in our next premium edition.

Scannx Licenses ABBYY SDK

Scannx has signed an agreement to license ABBYY's FineReader SDK. SCANNX is an ISV focused on providing cloud services for scanning and capture. The ABBYY license is for traditional OCR/ICR software that will initially be incorporated in the book scanning software that is going to be bundled with the new Xerox book scanners that are being marketed by Scannx.

From the press release: "We are integrating ABBYY’s technology into our software and bundling it into a self-service book scanning center for library patrons and staff”, said John C. Dexter, president and COO of Scannx. “The book scanning center includes a 15-inch touchscreen computer preloaded with the Scannx and ABBYY software, and a patented book-edge scanner to protect the spine of the book. The scanner’s beveled edge enables students to scan to the edge of the book spine, producing clear and legible text in the center of the book. When the clear image is converted into searchable or editable text by ABBYY’S FineReader technology, the result is unmatched accuracy. Moreover, our implementation for OCR conversion is more than twice as fast as competitive systems.”

ABBYY Signs Reseller Agreement with Xerox

Xerox will now be selling ABBYY's Flexicapture document and data capture and Recognition Server OCR and PDF software, in connection with its DocuShare Web-based document management platform. Introduced as primarily an electronic document repository at least 10 years ago, Xerox has introduced records management and workflow features in recent years. With the ABBYY software Xerox is adding intelligent data capture and server-based OCR to the mix.

Xerox represents ABBYY's largest reseller partner. More on this in an upcoming premium issue of DIR.

Dicom to distribute KnowledgeLake in EMEA

European-based value-added distributor Dicom has announced it will act as KnowledgeLake's distribution arm for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa territory. KnowldgeLake is a St. Louis-based ISV that has emerged as a market leader for adding document imaging to SharePoint deployments. KnowledgeLake has more than 1,500 customers using its software, but almost all of those are in North America. Dicom, the hardware distributor that spun off from Kofax earlier this year, adds KnowledgeLake to a growing portfolio of software products that also include Kofax Express, Kodak Capture Pro, and most recently,CaptureBites.

More on this in this week's premium edition.

The deal was announced at DMS, which is being held this week in Germany.

Laserfiche Offers to Trade-In Program

In the wake of HP's announcement that is acquirinig Autonomy, which owns the Interwoven and iManage document management software code and install base, Laserfiche has announced "a trade-in program designed to help customers of acquired enterprise content management (ECM) vendors easily and cost-effectively upgrade to a full-featured—and fully supported—Laserfiche ECM system."

Accoridng to a press release, "Laserfiche’s trade-in program allows new customers to receive credit for the value of their existing ECM systems when converting from a competitor’s product to Laserfiche." Not sure who is coming up with that "existing value," but it's a great idea by Laserfiche. It kind of sounds like the "Cash for Clunkers" Laserfiche was promoting a couple years ago in conjunction with the federal government's buying of old, gas-guzzling cars.

We've seen ISVs take a similar approach with VARs and offer to give their customers software for free if they can just switch their base over to the new vendor's maintenance program - and then also sign on for new software sales. We understand there is some of this going on in the capture market right now in fact.

Cranel Partner Event

Over here in Columbus for a couple days at value-added distributor Cranel's annual North American Executive Partner Event. I was invited to give one of the keynotes and discussed "How not to Choke on Your Alphabet Soup:  Your guide to successfully navigating emerging trends in the areas of MPS, IDR, and BPM," which I consider to be three of the most important acronyms facing our VAR community. I think about 80 VAR representatives in all will be attending the event. Talk seemed to be well received, even if no one in the room could come up with the answer to the question of what IDR stands for. That just gives you a little idea of the disconnect between the vendor and VAR communities.

I received some good feedback on my talk, especially from one gentleman who is the president of a copier dealer brokerage that is transitioning to "document solutions." He explained to me some of the difficulties that copier dealers have with the up front investments and long sales cycles associated with taking on a document management practice. He was lucky in picking up a salesperson with several established accounts that he brought over from his former employers, so he hit the ground running.

Chad Stigall, a product marketing manager for Cranel, spoke before me. His focus was SharePoint (which is also part of my focus as well). His comment about VARs needing a SharePoint strategy, even if they don't necessarily build SharePoint imaging solutions, struck me as especially poignant.

DocuLex Announces New Education Program

From the press release:  DocuLex, Inc.(http://www.doculex.com/), creator of award-winning, business-ready document management software, announced today the initiation of its Customer Experience Program, a program that will revolve around further education for DocuLex Dealers and Partners on the benefits of owning DocuLex software.  Aspects of the program will include increases in educational email, mail and other communications, regular webinars on newly released and forgotten features of the Archive Studio Software Suite, post-service surveys, prompt follow up to requests for upgrades and annual support (maintenance bundles), information on professional services available, as well as a venue for escalating outstanding issues.

"There was a gap in our existing processes that was becoming increasingly obvious – the need in the channel for more education on the benefits of the DocuLex Archive Studio Software Suite for document management."

Couldn't agree more that there is significant opportunity around education to take full advantage of document management software features - especially when you sell through the digital copier channel, like DocuWare primarily does. 

Konica Minolta to resell Kodak scanners

In another sign of the convergence of the MFP and document capture spaces, Konica Minolta has been announced it will be reselling Kodak scanners and Kodak Capture Pro Software. Konica Minolta and Kodak have a long history together based on microfilm sales, but the move into document scanners appears to take the relationship in somewhat of a new direction - as microfilm is a dying market, and capture -especially when being sold as part of the new managed print services (MPS) wave being currently pushed by MFP vendors, is clearly a growth arena.

For Kodak, the move represents another step in its efforts to broaden its scanner reseller channels. First you had the KAIR (Kodak Authorized Imaging Reseller) channel, who focused on mid- and high-volume scanners, then they added KDSR (Kodak Desktop Scanner Reseller), focused on distribtuted scannners - and now those two channels have been combined. You also have a lot of volume going through what Kodak calls Direct Market Resellers, which includes organizations like Dell and CDW.

Russell Hunt, Kodak's Regional Business Manager for U.S. and Canada, recently told DIR that Kodak has had to go outside its traditional reseller channel to drive significant growth. "Unless we land extraordinarily large wins, we're not seeing big growth out of our KAIR channel," he said during a recent analyst meeting in Rochester. "That's why we're reaching out more to new channels and partners like MFP vendors."