Lexmark ES Q1 Numbers Disturbing

For those of you that haven't done the math for yourselves, Lexmark Enterprise Software (ES) saw about a 15% decline in revenue for Q1, YOY. Yes, we realize Lexmark reported 60% growth for ES on revenue of $143 million, but last year's Q1 didn't include Kofax's numbers. In calendar Q1 last year (Kofax's fiscal Q3), the ISV did $75 million in revenue, and it also acquired a $9 million a year business in Aia Software towards the end of the quarter. So, we'll put Kofax's Q1 2015 revenue at around $77 million.

In the meantime, Perceptive Software, operating as a division of Lexmark, reported $90 million for the first quarter of 2015. If you put those two figures together, it gives you a Q1 2015 revenue number of $167 million, $24 million more than the two combined businesses reported this year for Q1 as parts of Lexmark ES. We don't have any insight into the breakdown of the Lexmark ES in numbers - in particular, how much was from generated in software sales, but we had heard rumors that Lexmark was struggling in that area in particular.

The 15% erosion in revenue is disturbing, and we hope it is not indicative of the industry's direction. We realize Lexmark has been struggling with integration issues, as well as uncertainty related to the recent sale of the company, so maybe the first quarter was an anomaly and the organization will bounce back strongly. That said, Lexmark's competitors are certainly trying to keep the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) levels pumped up, as I heard a lot of talk at the recent AIIM Conference related to the potential challenges of being owned by a group of investors from China.

In addition to Lexmark, Open Text failed to show organic growth in Q1 (its fiscal Q3), EMC's Enterprise Content Division (ECD) revenue continued to shrink, down to $134 million in Q1 2016 from $138 million in Q1 2015 (not to mention the fact that EMC is reportedly trying to sell ECD to help fund the Dell acquisition), and Top Image Systems (TIS) struggled in Q4 '15 with its Q1 2016 numbers still to come. It has not been all bleak news, as smaller companies like DocuWare and M-Files reported strong growth for 2015, and Hyland Software had another strong year as well.

What is somewhat interesting is that DocuWare, M-Files, and to some extent Hyland, are focused on the SMB space (Hyland stressing the "M"), while EMC, Kofax, and to some extent ReadSoft (also part of Lexmark ES) and Open Text are more focused on the enterprise space. So, maybe the growth in the ECM market is in the traditionally underserved SMB space (as we've been predicting would happen for years). This would certainly bode well for TIS, which recently put a stronger focus on shopping financial process automation to the mid-market.  Then again, the Perceptive Software's content management business is a major part of Lexmark ES and it focuses on the mid-market (we're really not sure how the individual components within the division made out).

When you add these recent ECM software struggles to the steady erosion we've seen in margins in the document scanner hardware market (as well as some of the reogranization at the leaders ), it makes us doubt the future of our industry. That said, the attitude at this week's AIIM Conference in New Orleans was not wholly pessimistic. There were plenty of optimistic vendors, a bevy of end users looking for solutions, and the usual group of energetic and imaginative people that combine to make our industry so exciting at times. New solutions stressing, the cloud, mobile, and emerging technology like natural language processing - as well as a new vision embracing enterprise content as data and thus creating a bridge for mainstream IT crossover, certainly created plenty of positive buzz at the AIIM event (or was that just the alcohol on Bourbon Street?). We'll have more details on what we learned at AIIM in the next issue of DIR.

In the meantime, let's hope for a stronger Q2 for everyone (well, except for your competitors in some cases, I guess.)

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.

What Ray Rice & Donald Sterling can Tell Us about the Future of Capture

For those of you who attended the Harvey Spencer Associates (HSA) Capture Conference last week, you got to see a cool presentation by HP Autonomy's Christopher Surdak on doing automated capture from video files. Examples that Surdak presented included matching license plate numbers with car models to protect against stolen vehicles and analyzing faces taken on video at airports for matches against dangerous persons databases.These aren't exactly examples of the transaction-oriented capture that HSA typically focuses on, but you can see where it could lead. Harvey likes to give the example of being able to take a video of a car engine that is not working right, and sending that video to the cloud - where analysis is done and then the user is sent a list of parts that they can order to fix the problem.


In DIR's annual news review and predictions presentation, I offered my opinion that as millennials and born digitals take over the workforce and smart phones and other computers continue to advance, videos and photos are going to become increasingly important to conducting business. Traditional documents are destined to become so yesterday.

A recent sports news story helps bring the point home about how much more powerful video cam be as a means of communication than traditional text. Many of you have by now surely heard the story of Ray Rice, the Baltimore Ravens running back that has been driven out of football due to his being caught beating up his fiancee this past offseason. Here's the timeline:

• Story comes out about Rice beating up girlfriend/fiancee. 
• Rice gets suspended for two games.
• People get up in arms about the light punishment and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell stiffens NFL's domestic abuse policy - but nothing more happens to Rice
• Video comes out showing what Rice admitted to
• Rice's team (Baltimore Ravens) terminate his contract and league suspends him indefinitely

 From this ESPN story on the Rice incident: "The source said that Rice admitted to the Ravens from the start that he was guilty of striking Janay and, for the most part, accurately described what they eventually saw on the video. But the brutality of the assault when seen on the security video made a different impression."

So, basically, until everybody actually saw what Rice was doing, the full impact of the event was not realized. As a text-oriented guy, this kind of disturbs me, because I really wasn't surprised by the video and had a hard time believing many people are just now becoming outraged with Rice's behavior. But then again, we had a similar situation with Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling earlier this year.

If you remember, Sterling was essentially driven out of the NBA after a recording surfaced with him making racial comments to his ex-girlfriend. Shocking right? Well, not so much.  As far back as 2006, Bomani Jones wrote this article for ESPN's Page 2, entitled "Sterling's Racism Should be News." In spite of this, big name athletes and Coach Doc Rivers continued to sign with the Clippers from 2006 through 2013. Then, they acted all surprised when his racist rants were caught on audio recording this spring.

The bottom line is that apparently, nobody in the mass market pays attention to text media anymore. Which brings me back to my point about multi-media being so much more powerful than text. Maybe traditional documents still have a place in business today, just like there is still print/text media out there being published. But as things move more toward video, audio, and the like in mass media, I don't think there is any question they will also move that way in business transactions. Didn't Blackberry rule the business world before iPhones took over the consumer market and then moved into business? The momentum in favor of video is just too great. Expect more video in business in the next few years!

10 Years of Capture Market Evolution

On my way to Harvey Spencer Associates Capture 2014 Conference, where I will be presenting for the 10th straight year. The industry has certainly evolved quite a bit in that time, as has the content of the conference. Here's a look at the agenda for this year's event. Here's an article I did previewing this special 10th anniversary edition of the event.

My presentation this year reflects the history of the conference, as Harvey has asked me to take a look back at how the market has evolved since 2005. I have a fairly detained presentation (that will be delivered in 15 minutes or so, so it will be action packed), but here's a preview of one slide, which includes what I consider to be the five biggest capture trends in the past 10 years:

1. Consolidation of Capture with ECM
2. Aggressive Movement of Hardware Vendors into Capture Software & Services
3. Emergence of Mobile & Cloud Technologies
4. SharePoint’s Emergence as an ECM Platform
5. Acceptance of Distributed Capture

 That's just a teaser. Lot more to come in my preso, such as a fairly detailed list of all the major M&A activity in capture market over past 10 years and my opinion on what it tells us.

Cheers.

How Google's Acquisition of JetPac is Relevant to You

One of the sessions at the upcoming Harvey Spencer Associates Capture Conference is entitled "Photo and Video Understanding: Augmented reality used in transactional information." It is being presented by (and this is a pretty long title, so get ready) Christopher Surdak, Global Subject Matter Expert, Information Governance, eDiscovery and Analytics, HP Autonomy. Anyhow, Harvey gave me brief explanation of why he felt this is relevant to his audience of mainly capture ISVs.

"[Surdak] is going to talk about some things I think are exciting," said the principal of HSA. "This includes the ability to lift up the hood for your Nissan, take a picture, and have an application figure out what engine parts you need and then take you to a list where you can order them. The ability to place the order and have it fulfilled is what creates the transaction. The subject matter is basically about capturing photos and video, instead of a static document, to trigger a transactions. Insurance claims adjustment is another example where this is relevant."

I was thinking about this session (HSA Capture is being held Sept. 3-4 at the Glen Cove Mansion on Long Island), this morning when I read that Google had acquired image recognition start-up JetPac. JetPac apparently makes technology that can analyze facial expressions on sites like Instagram and use those analytics to make recommendations about the best places to go (for example, best bars) in a geographical area. This is interesting because it also combines another topic that was covered at HSA last year, which was "sentiment analysis." Last year Brian Garr of LinguaSys, presented on how his company analyzed the sentiment expressed in texts on social media sites and is able to let businesses know what people are saying about them. When you think about combining the power of JetPac and LiguaSys and introducing it into current capture applications, the possibilities are fairly powerful. Let's just say it could make Smart Process Applications even smarter.

As we wrote in a recent article in our premium edition of DIR, the capture market sure has come a long way in 10 years.

Follow-up on IOFM Payments Summit

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the second IOFM Payments Summit in Baltimore. As detailed in an article in last week's DIR, I left with two major takeaways for our industry from the event, which was attended by 230 people - a 70% increase over attendance at last fall's inaugural Payments Summit. Here is a condensed version of what we wrote (let me know if you'd like to see the full article):

• Automated EOB capture is very much alive and well in the payment processing space: There was a time when we believed that EOB capture might be the second killer app in the IDR (intelligent document recognition space) behind invoice capture. In the document capture market that idea came and went as ISVs struggled to gain a significant number of installs.
  
  What many in our industry failed to recognize is that like capturing invoices, capturing EOBs is more than just an OCR/data entry operation. EOBs are part of a healthcare billing process and EOB capture must be addressed as part of that process. Improving payment processing in healthcare through technology is currently a hot market and EOB capture is a part of this. However, it’s often not the traditional ECM players that are supplying these solutions. Rather it’s the payment processing organizations, banks, and lockbox providers (and ISVs that sell to them), that are stepping up because of their experience with receivables.
  
  That said, I'm not sure how good some of their automated EOB capture technology is, as a lot of it is homegrown by the payment processing ISVs. Clearly, it's better than not using any OCR at all, but when Orbograph's Bryan Bruton told me about the recognition improvements his start-up gained after it was acquired by Orbograph, it got me thinking that there may be opportunity out there for other document recognition specialists to license their EOB capture to some of these payment processing specialists.
  
• Payment processing organizations are struggling with the increasing trend toward electronic payments:  The general consensus is that it is the easier-to-process payments, like utility bills, that are moving online first, but there is also a desire by organizations to utilize imagng on a greater variety of documents. The result a dichotomy in the payments market as related to imaging. On one side, paper payments are decreasing. On the other side, more organizations than ever are recognizing the value in digitizing their transactional documents as soon as possible to transition from paper to electronic workflows. So, while imaging of traditional remittance payments may be on the decline, imaging in general is on the upswing. And payment processors that can address a greater variety of imaging applications, including full page capture and workflow, appear to be emerging as the winners--which represents another opportunity for traditional document capture vendors to sell into the payments processing space.
  
  
  
   

News on Upcoming Events from IOFM, Notable Solutions, HSA & Kofax

IOFM Preps for Second Payments Summit

Building on success of last year’s inaugural event, the Institute of Finance andManagement (IOFM) is gearing up for its second annual Payments Summit. The event, which focuses on B2B and C2B payments, is being held June 2-4 at the Hyatt Regency on the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. It features a day and a half of conference sessions, as well as an exhibition area.

Last year’s event had 100-150 attendees and IOFM organizers are expecting more this year. “Sign-ups have been steady, but we are still looking for more attendees and also have openings for exhibitors,” said RD Whitney, Executive Director for IOFM, which is owned by Diversified Business Communications. “We think we have the only event that focuses on the full spectrum of payments and provides a holistic view of payments automation.”

The Payments Summit was launched last year targeting former TAWPI members who felt alienated by the direction of IFO (the Institute of Financial Operations), which bought the TAWPI trade organization in 2011. IFO incorporated the former TAWPI show in its Fusion event, which is primarily focused on accounts payable. IOFM also hosts an accounts payable conference, but feels it is filling a market need with a dedicated A/R conference.

Last year’s Payments Summit was well received, and once again former TAWPI executive Mark Brousseau will be emceeing this year’s event. There is no headliner keynote, but the agenda features a steady stream of panels and end user presenters designed to provide peer-to-peer education. Last year’s hot topics included the challenges of managing multi-channel payment streams, as well as automating capture from full-page documents like EOB forms.

IBML is signed on as the title sponsor. Other exhibitors that Document Imaging talk readers may be familiar with include OPEX, BancTec, eGistics, Creditron, Data Dimensions, Fairfax Imaging, MAVRO, Open Scan, and Orbograph. Early attendee sign-ups include executives from industries like banking, telco, healthcare and retail, as well as trade associations and third-party payment processors.

Notable Solutions hosts inaugural US event

Capture and print management ISV Notable Solutions will be hosting its inaugural North American end user event that same week as the Payments Summit, also on the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. eNgage 2014 will run June 4-5 at the Pier 5 Waterfront Hotel. Keynote speakers include Bob Larrivee, director custom research at AIIM and Feri Clayton, director, ECM, IBM Software Group. Notable Solutions end uses from organizations like Toyota, Tulane University, and Fairfax County Government will also present.

“This event is in response to numerous requests from our customers and partners to bring together industry experts to discuss the key challenges facing organizations today,” said Mehdi Tehranchi, Notable Solutions CEO, as quoted in a press release. “We also plan on sharing the successes of those customers who have raised the bar by implementing cost-efficient systems to securely manage and gain greater participation in their business processes.”

Why Kofax Transform is Moving to Las Vegas

Kofax has apparently outgrown the locations at the San Diego Bayfront Hilton where its annual Transform event has been held the past four years. Transform 2015 will be held at in Las Vegas, March 8-11. The 2015 AIIM Conference will then be held in San Diego March 18-20. Kofax is hoping to attract a more international crowd and feels Las Vegas is a better location for that as well. Apparently, AIIM checked with Kofax before scheduling their event in San Diego, so there is no conflict here.

HSA Capture Agenda Shaping up
Finally, once again I have been invited to give my news review and predictions at this year's upcoming Harvey Spencer Capture Conference. The event is being held Sept. 3-4 at its usual location at the Glen Cove Mansion on Long Island. Other topics on the agenda include Big Data, Computational Linguistics and Semantic Understanding, and Photo and Video Understanding. Hope to see you there.

Prepping for ReadSoft User Conference, May 14-16

Looks like I'm heading down to this year's ReadSoft User Conference, May 14-16 New Orleans.. Should be a good, fun and productive event. I'm expecting to get an overview on ReadSoft's direction through a combination of attending the sessions, one-on-one interviews with ReadSoft executives and partners, and some good ole' Nawlins networking.

I visited the ReadSoft offices almost a year ago and came away with this overview of their basically two-pronged strategy: expanding their capture and P2P practices. It will be interesting to see how that strategy has evolved over the year, under the guidance of Andrew Pery, who was working for ReadSoft as a consultant when I visited last year, and was later named the company's first CMO.

ReadSoft is coming on an improved first quarter that included 27% YOY growth in software license sales and a 9% increase in overall revenue. ReadSoft's EBITDA was improved, but the ISV still lost money. According to President & CEO Per Åkerberg CEO, as quoted in the press release on the Q1 financials, "Our EBITDA result and our margins have taken clear s teps in the right direction....A gradual change in the reporting of our revenues from our support and maintenance agreements has affected this quarter’s result negatively compared to first quarter last year. This effect means no lost revenue but only a time delay in the reporting of these revenues."

AIIM 2014, Freakanomics, and Freddie Mercury

Just got back from enjoying three days at the AIIM Conference 2014 in Orlando. Yes, the weather was great - especially considering the winter/spring we had/are having up here in northwestern PA. But, as I predicted in my previous post, I ended up spending very little time outside enjoying the weather. Instead, my time was spent mostly indoors at the conference, enjoying great conversations, ideas, networking, sessions, and alright, I had a few beers.

I'll have full coverage of the event in my next premium issue of DIR, coming out next week, but I wanted to go over one thought I had, which was re-enforced by a podcast I happened to be listening to on the way home. That thought is that we in the technology industry often get way ahead of the end users. No, this is not anything strikingly new, but I think we all need a little reminding now and then.

For example, I attended a roundtable on high-volume scanner. Mark Brousseau (a former DIR editor many moons ago) was the host and, as always, he did a great job encouraging audience participation. In other words, he called people out and demanded to know why they were there. Anyhow, the biggest problem among the end users at the roundtable was manual sorting of documents. One user specifically complained about having to print and insert bar-coded separator sheets before scanning, even though they were licensing capture software from a vendor who has an auto-classification option. Heck, there are multiple auto-classification products on the market. I've seen the demos and they seem to work well enough, but as usual, in many cases the users seem to be too heads down with their operations to want to try anything new. Based on my experience covering capture technologies like OCR and IDR, I'm convinced that it's just a matter of time before auto-classification is widely adopted - it's just that that time is not here as fast as many vendors want it to be.

In addition, I heard more than one comment about the lack of technological savvy of many of the conference attendees. I think they may have felt they were talking over the attendees' heads-which they may have been. But, this is a good reality check. It helps everyone realize that the buyers are not as sophisticated as we often want them to be. After all, these attendees each spent probably a couple grand to come to the event, so they weren't there to fool around. They were looking for something - but maybe it wasn't quite the advanced something that many vendors were pitching - at least not yet. Remember, it takes an acorn to grow an oak.

Finally, all of this was re-enforced on my ride home when listening a recent Freakonomics podcast. It is titled "It's Fun to Smoke Marijuana,"and no , that's not the title of an old Cheech & Chong album (well, maybe it is too), but in this case it is referring to what is supposedly being said by Queen when you play their hit single "Another One Bites the Dust" backwards. Basically, if you don't know they are supposed to be saying that, it sounds like gibberish, but if you are listening for it, it's like how could you miss it?

The podcast is about how people's perspectives are skewed by their own knowledge. Because we know so much about advanced capture, we naturally think others should too. This podcast explains that this is not a character flaw - it's really just natural. Anyhow, just something to keep in mind when marketing to all those luddites out there.

Cheers.

Ralph

Heading to AIIM Conference 2014

Have a few minutes as I'm delayed in the Buffalo Airport for another hour it appears. Looking forward to heading down to Orlando for a few days of nice weather - even if I am going to be suffering from the eternal conference conundrum - you are stuck inside (at least) 90% of the time. But, nonetheless I'm certain the company will be good. I have a number of great appointments set up and am looking forward to catching up both on and off the record with multiple people and organizations.

There are also a lot of good conference tracks and roundtables on the agenda.

Free wi-fi in airports is a great development. I'm sitting here plugged in at one of those Southwest counters, working almost as efficiently as I would be at my home office (fingers crossed).

Speaking of hi-tech developments, I'm liking this AIIM app so far. From what I understand they are not going to have any paper agendas distributed at the event, so they are kind of forcing people to use the app. Seems to be working as there is certainly a good amount of activity on it. However, I just went through and tried to select my agenda and some of the events that were listed online seem to be missing in the app agenda. Need to figure this out, although I'll probably end up missing half the sessions I plan on hitting anyhow - as I get caught up in conversations.

Alright, plane is here. Should be boarding in a few minutes. Looking forward to seeing some of you in Orlando later today!

Scheduled for a root canal on Friday

Top DIR Story #3 of 2013: Another Strong AIIM Conference

Here's our third top story of the year for 2013 (DIR's Top and second top stories from 2013): 

3. Strong AIIM Conference - For the second year in a row, AIIM pulled off a very strong event. It drew more than 600 attendees and 30 exhibitors to the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans - representing a 50% growth over the previous year, when the initial event was held. Yes, there was an AIIM show for decades previously, but that show was sold by the trade organization in 2002 and was eventually re-branded as info360 in 2012, as AIIM pulled its branding. Along with its branding, AIIM also pulled its annual awards dinner - and all the executive power that it draws - and moved the gala to the site of its own re-booted conference.

The new AIIM Conference is not as ambitious in scope as the event that eventually became info360, but the new event has sold out both years (there are no "Show only passes), and AIIM is planning an even bigger conference for this year in Orlando, April 1-3. The plan is for the event to remain a hotel-hosted educational focused conference, but its success seems to have been enough to put the failing info360 event out of business - as the 2013 version of that event was cancelled.

We'll look forward to seeing quite a few of year in Orlando in a few months.

Make Sure You Read the End of This - ARMA Notes & More

ARMA - the Records Management Association  - held its 58th annual conference and exhibition last week in Las Vegas. I didn't attend, but wanted to share with you a couple insights from people who where there:

1. ARMA produced this podcast, which is an interview with IBML EVP, Worldwide Sales and Business Development Robert Sbrissa. Sbrissa has been in our industry for a few years and has a good perspective on how things have evolved. Here's a quote by him from that podcast that I really liked:


"We are seeing this year customer looking for not only what’s new but what’s simplified and improved – as our technology is evolving and becoming more efficient and easier to deploy. Customers  now realize that the technology exists. The question is how to choose technology that is simpler, easier to implement and easier to maintain."

2. Also, Art Nichols, VP of sales at recognition ISV NovoDynamics shared this insight with us: "Document classification to the ARMA folks is as likely to mean dealing with existing text files (word, excel, email) as it is they way we use it in forms /image capture."

I thought this was interesting because it jives with the content/first tack that  that Content Analyst, an ISV with a specialty in semantic understanding, seems to be taking as it attempts to expand its market from the e-discovery space, where it has had its initial success. And that seems to be part of the issue with semantic understanding in general as we attempt to apply it to the ECM market - where does it fit best? In a capture or an RM process, i.e. in the front-or-the back-end of the application? Of course, this is kind of the same issue that Kofax is broaching as it introduces BPM into it capture/SPA frameworks. It's all a bit muddled, but will likely make sense in the end when capture is finally subsumed by ECM - or vice-versa, and it all ends up as some sort of real-time, on-demand indexing/retrieval workflow paradigm that gets the right info to the right person at the optimal time - isn't that all we're after anyhow.

Business Imaging Expo Less than Five Weeks Out

The Business Imaging Expo, being put on by 1105 Media, is set for Dec. 10-12 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Vegas. The event is aimed at Office Imaging vendors, dealers, and channel and is expected to draw around 1,500 total attendees, including 75-100 vendor exhibitors.

A pair of executive summits kick things off on Tuesday, Dec. 10: one on MPS, and the other on workflow, which has a focus on ECM and document imaging technologies. Featured speakers include Pam Doyle of Fujitsu, Bruce Orcutt of Kofax, and Ron Glaz of IDC.

“This is a brand new event that is a mix of everything we cover,” said Amy Weiss, editorial director for 1105 Media’s Office Technology Group. Weiss oversees three publications: Recharger Magazine, The Imaging Channel, and Workflow. “We see this event as really representing the future of the office imaging market. The tagline features ‘service, supplies, and solutions’ and we see opportunity where those three areas converge. We hope to provide some cutting edge content and information for attendees looking to address the future of the market."

Early-bird rates are in effect until Nov. 15. You can register online at businessimagingexpo.com/events/bix2013

Kurzweil, the Wisdom of Harvey Spencer, & Kofax TA 7.0

A couple weeks ago at Kodak Alaris' excellent Global Directions 13 Conference, noted futurist and technology author Ray Kurzweil gave the keynote. As I noted earlier, he totally delivered on the hype, and gave an excellent talk discussing everything from his roots in the document imaging industry to how and why we are going to live much longer in the near future. The main theme of his talk was how information technology grows at an exponential, and not a linear, speed. This causes people to underestimate the improvements that will be made a few years down the road, and as a result, the effect these improvements will have on our lives.

Related to this, Kurzweil noted that people developing technology products need to be working on stuff that makes sense three to four years down the road. This made me reflect on the Harvey Spencer Associates' conference I had attended two weeks earlier. At the HSA conferences, Harvey likes to push the envelope of the capture industry. In fact, he will often have speakers that make you think, what the heck does this have to do with the market? This year, in fact, there were a couple speakers that focused on voice technology, which, aside from Nuance, wouldn't seem to affect anyone in the capture market. But, when you consider Kurzweil's sentiments, maybe it will.

For some perspective, I took a look at the agenda for the second HSA Capture conference, held in 2006. One of the sessions was "Check 21 and its Impact on the Convergence of Document and Transaction Processing." I remember telling Harvey at the time, I really didn't see the connection between payments and document processing. But, low and behold, some seven years later, at IOFM Payments Summit I attended recently, the convergence of documents and payments processing was one of the major themes.

Of course, Windows Vista was also a topic on the agenda at HSA Capture 2006, so you can't win them all, but, I think it's safe to say, in line with Kurzweil's strategy, looking ahead a few years when developing new technology is important, because it helps get you to market ahead of the competition, who can follow, but will have a tough time unseating an established leader. SharePoint 2007 was another topic discussed at HSA 2006, and by that time KnowledgeLake already had an established, if small, capture-to-SharePoint practice. As Spencer's vision of the influence of SharePoint proved correct, and it spread as a popular ECM repository, KnoweldgeLake blossomed from a start-up to a major player in our industry, while other vendors scrambled to catch up.

Which all brings us to Kofax's announcement today of Total Agility 7, a platform for implementing smart process applications (SPA). Kofax first unveiled its SPA strategy about a year ago. At the time I wondered what the heck they were talking about. Kofax's CMO Martyn Christian (who left the company about a month ago), however, did a pretty good job tying SPAs to the newly defined "first-mile" of business processes and the strategy started to make sense, but I was still wondering how Kofax planned to address it. Well, Total Agility 7, which has apparently (per Kurzweil's advice) been in the works for several years and some $125 million worth of acquisition and R&D investment, makes it all clear. Basically, it's a Web-based (eventually cloud-based) platform with all the tools needed to create SPAs.

I'll expound more on this in my next premium issue of DIR, as Kofax CTO Anthony Macciola gave me a great interview on the details of TA 7. In brief, it combines Kofax's existing capture technology, with its internally developed mobile tools, with the technology from the acquisitions Kofax has made over the past few years, and puts in all in a Webified, cloud-ready environment that appears ready to address what Kofax hopes is an emerging market for SPA solutions.

Live from Kodak (Alaris) DI Global Directions

About 400 people here at the event being held in the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at the National Harbor in Washington, DC. Mix of Kodak employees, resellers/channel, end users, ISV partners and media/analyst. The great Ray Kurzweil gave the opening keynote.

Kurzweil, a renowned futurist, discussed the exponential growth of the information technology market. He also said that companies competing in this market need to be looking 3-4 years out. This coincided nicely with the Big Data message that seems prevalent at the conference. Speakers from big-time software companies like Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com took the dais on Day 1 and there overwhelming message was that Big Data is coming.

So, what does this mean to the attendees? Two things as far as Kodak Alaris Document Imaging is concerned:

1. The emergence of a multi-channel/source capture model to deal with an increase in information being received by organizations through an increasing number of input sources.
2. The need to add some sort of intelligent processing to efficiently manage this increasing volume of incoming information - which is the point of the Info Insight software that Kodak first discussed last year and recently made available as a product.

Kodak Event to Focus on Leading Edge Information Management

Here's an excerpt from an article that appeared in last week's premium edition of DIR:

From Sept. 22-25, Kodak DI will be hosting its second annual Global Directions Conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Washington D.C. The event features a keynote by Ray Kurzweil, the noted technology inventor, author, and visionary who is currently employed as the director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil, who is probably most widely known for his work on artificial intelligence, but was also an early pioneer in the area of applied OCR, will talk on “The Next Wave of Intelligent Information Management.” According to the Global Directions Web site, the talk “sets the stage and explores the exponential increase in computing power, computing intelligence, and the inexorable impact they will have on transforming information management for the enterprise.”

This is in line with the event’s theme of intelligent information management. “We look at Global Directions as an educational conference,” explained Tim Palmer, VP of worldwide marketing for Kodak DI. “We want to help advance the thinking of the whole industry around understanding information and taking friction and cost out of business processes.”

The other opening day keynotes reflect this broad focus that expands well beyond the traditional areas of business for Kodak DI. In additional to Kurzweil, high level executives from IBM, Google, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft will take the dais to discuss topics like big data and analytics, smarter enterprise search, the death of the desktop, and the future of business collaboration. There will also be a panel discussion moderated by Michael Hickins, editor, Wall Street Journal/CIO Journal, that will pull together multiple keynote speakers, including Kurzweil.

“We are taking a very broad view of where Kodak DI intersects with traditional business and new business going forward. We are looking to have our brand and division associated with end users, service providers, manufactures, resellers, etc., as they think about what they need to do to go to market in the future.

“If you consider the concept of information workflow, traditionally capture for us has meant scanning paper documents. But, we realize that information is coming from more and more sources and the growth of digital information as input is increasing exponentially. In the future, we need to help businesses capture information not only from paper, but from multiple other sources.

“‘Collecting’ is probably a better term than ‘capture,’ when you talk about taking this one large stream of information and getting it all to the right places, routing it, understanding it, semantically and contextually, and making sure you have the right associations and the right conclusions are being made.”

We asked Palmer, if Kodak’s Info Insight platform, which brings semantic and contextual understanding to the table, will be prominently featured at Global Directions. “It certainly fits on the far right of the information workflow model,” he said. “But, the event is focused on themes that are much wider than our current product offerings.”

A look at the agenda
After a Sunday evening reception, the full first day of Global Directions, Monday, Sept. 23, will be full of keynotes presented in a general session followed by an exhibitor showcase where dinner will be served. Tuesday and Wednesday will feature four tracks of breakout sessions, with no more than two or three sessions overlapping at a given time. Tuesday evening will feature a “Monuments by Moonlight” bus tour of downtown D.C.

Kodak is hoping for 300-400 attendees, or about double the number from last year’s inaugural Global Directions, which was held in Las Vegas [see DIR 9/28/12]. “We are looking to make a giant leap forward with this year’s event,” said Palmer. “We felt last year was pretty successful, and we definitely learned a lot, but this year we feel we are really offering a world class conference.

“We think we have a strong enough program to attract senior IT executives at end user organizations and business process owners. Primarily we are marketing to end users with the understanding that if they show up, systems integrators and resellers will certainly follow. We are marketing the event throughout the U.S., as well as internationally. We expect a decent turnout from Central and South America, and our team in Europe is looking to bring over some top end users customers—at least a double-digit number. Just because of logistics, we think it may a little tough to attract attendees from Asia-Pac.”


Kodak is also looking for sponsors and exhibitors. It is looking for a total surpassing 20. “Anyone that believes they can make a contribution to the future of intelligent information management is encouraged to exhibit at Global Directions,” said Palmer. “We expect plenty of end users to be on hand looking for those types of partners. We are taking a broad view of this conference as an educational opportunity, and we are looking for a similarly broad representation of exhibitors.

“The bottom line is that I think we are at the beginning of a very exciting period of time that will play out over the next 5, 10, and even 25 years. I sense another revolution in the way we are going to use information. With the presentations and networking at Global Directions, we hope to help attendees bridge the gap between this revolutionary vision and the practical first steps that need to be taken. We are hoping people are able to come away from our event energized and with at least a few things that they can put into action when they get back in the office on Thursday [Sept. 26].”

A Look at Kofax's First Mile Marketing Strategy

Just got back in the office from another Kofax Transform event. Don't know many years I've been covering this event - at least since 2006. This year's event was in San Diego, and the weather was fairly awesome. The event itself was strong too, with close to 600 attendees from 25 countries.

One of the themes was Kofax's introduction of  a new marketing message that is being built around the idea of building out the First Mile (TM) of customer interaction:

That picture is Martyn Christian, CMO of Kofax, presenting on "Delivering on the First Mile." Basically, Kofax's message is around connecting "systems of engagement" with "systems of record," and it was a good thing that John Mancini, president of AIIM, and Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm and other books, were around to help explain this marriage. Both Moore and Mancini have spoken and written on this topics for several years. But, from my standpoint at least, Kofax is the first vendor I've heard that has developed a coherent strategy for really connecting the two.

And this strategy is built around SPAs, or smart process applications. I'm not going to get into a huge explanation of what SPAs are right now, but Forrester's Craig LeClair does a pretty good job of it in this article that appeared in last week's premium DIR.

Basically, the First Mile message is that businesses need a set of technologies to connect their evolving set of customer interactions with their back-end line of business systems. In other words, customers are communicating with businesses in an increasing number of ways - paper, e-mail, social media, call centers, etc. And businesses are under increasing pressure (due to the potential speed and ease-of-use of properly executed digital transactions)  to process these communications in an efficient and customer friendly fashion. Capturing paper communications effectively is certainly one avenue to this, but so is capturing e-mail and mobile interactions - and not only capturing these communications, but enabling customers to input them in a way that is intuitive and user friendly. Kofax is attempting to deliver on this promise with a combination of multi-channel capture, BPM, and analytics technologies

All that was pretty cool, and there was a lot more that went on at Transform that I will be covering through various avenues (multi-channel communication?) over the next few weeks. Also, next week I'm headed to New Orleans for both the Canon's ICS Division (formerly IFS) national reseller meeting and the annual AIIM Conference, as well as a stop in at Microsoft Dynamics Convergence. Let me know if you are going to be in town and want to connect.

Kodak's Software Focus

Kind of ironic that an old photography giant like Kodak should spend so much time talking about focus at its recent Global Directions conference in Las Vegas. But, that's exactly what the Rochester-based imaging vendor did this week. Subscribers to our newsletter will get full coverage later today, but basically, Kodak spent the conference spotlighting its two new software product, Info Activate for SharePoint capture and Info Insight for IDR, as well as ISV partner solutions in areas like records management and creating taxonomies.

And hardware, well, it was barely mentioned. I think there might have been a session or two on Kodak's new Asset Management Software for remote scanner management, but that was about it. No, Kodak certainly hasn't given up on the document scanner market - according to Dolores Kruchten, who is now the president of DI, Kodak still invests more in hardware development than software development. It's just that like the MFP vendors, Kodak knows there are better margins and growth in software and services going forward than in hardware. After all, Harvey Spencer Associates has projected an 11% CAGR for the capture software market through 2016. We're not sure when the last time was that the document scanner market saw double digit annual revenue growth.

Of course, many of you already know that this is not Kodak's first venture into software. Originally, there was the initiative that eventually spawned Kofile- basically a digital microfilm retrieval software package that eventually became a lower-end document management system (not sure I got that description completely right, but I think it's close). Then, there was the 1997 acquisition of Eastman Software, which DIR once labeled "The $260 Million Mistake," when the charred remains were sold off in 2001 (although Kodak did ended recouping some, if not all, of that money through a patent deal a few years later).

But Kruchten assured us that this time will be different, and Kodak will succeed because of the focus it is now placing on its software business. That focus was certainly evident at Global Directions. I don't ever remember Eastman Software getting its own conference, for instance, and it was a $50 million business when it was acquired. DI is also counting on whoever buys it to help it even further increase its investment in its software product lines going forward.

Kodak Global Directions 2012

Out here in Las Vegas (JW Marriott up in the hills a bit) for Kodak's first Global Directions conference. About 200 people here, which Kodak described as 60% SIs, and 30% end users. Rest our technology partners and analysts. Certainly smaller than Kodak Breakaway events in the past, but also not necessarily trying to be Breakaway.

To get a taste of what's going on out here, check out Twitter #kgd2012.

Tony Barbeau, GM of Kodak Document Imaging has described the event more of as an industry than a vendor event, of which Kodak is a sponsor. And Kodak has mostly delivered on this promise. There is not a lot of Kodak vendor content in many of the presentations. I'm sitting in Kodak DM Director of Technologies Roland Simonis' presentation on IDR right now, and he certainly has not mentioned a Kodak product 45 minutes into his talk.

Kodak did introduce an IDR product at the conference, InfoInsight, powered by German ISV ITyX. But, Simonis is clearly presenting an educational, not an advertorial track. Lot of good, diverse presenters here, including Shad White of CloudPower, Brian Dirking of Box, and Rai Wasner of Kollabria, who helped put the agenda together.

Interesting this is that scanning hardware, Kodak DI's bread-and-butter for many years, are really not playing a prominent role. This was a deliberate move to Kodak to really spotlighting their software. I'll get into reasons for this in my next premium issue, but it certainly seems like a good idea, as expanding into software and solutions are clearly the future for Kodak DI.

Docville Event set for May 9

Michael Ziegler's Docville group has scheduled another event for Wednesday, May 9 in Brussels. Docville is a networking organization made up primarily of European ISV, integrators, and VARs that focus on the document management space. This will be the group's third event, with the one held last fall drawing approximately 90 attendees.

The highlight of the event are focused roundtable discussions that are led by topical experts. This event's roundtable topics include:

• From AP Invoice Processing to an Integrated P2P Approach - What are the Challenges & Opportunities?
•  The value of Business Process Management – a must have or has the battle been lost?
• From Scanning to Electronic Document Capture & Processing – Changing Platforms, Challenges & Solution Providers
  • Document Service BPOs – what are the global trends that promise profitable growth?
  • Is the Digital Mailroom having a renaissance?
  • SharePoint ECM: Leveraging Microsoft and Microsoft SharePoint Partners; Complementary or Competitive?
  • Changing Software Licensing & Delivery Models – Impact on Vendors and Customers
  • What can semantic technologies accomplish for document understanding & document management?
  • Document Service BPOs: Hybrid Records supporting business decisions and ensuring ROI is not killed by legacy – overcoming the challenge
  • What is Next for SharePoint ECM?
  • Process Automation in Human Resource Management – is the potential really there?
  • An International Government G-Cloud – What are the challenges and Opportunities for Suppliers?