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.

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."

Kofax Reaffirms Microsoft Focus

At the AIIM show in April, we caught up with a Kofax exec who told us the document capture ISV had some 200 implementations of users scanning into SharePoint repositories. This included British Waterways, which was touting savings of some $17 million credited to a SharePoint ECM implementation that included Kofax and some other third-party software products.

At Harvey Spencer's recent Capture Conference , we touted two reasons we believe it makes sense for indepentent capture vendors to get on board the Microsoft SharePoint train:

1. While other ECM players increase their capture technology, Microsoft will never get into capture
2.  SharePoint Continues to Grow in Importance as Windows desktop faces marginalization from mobile device

Kofax is exhibiting at the current Microsoft SharePoint Conference and issued this release today, touting itself as a leader in capturing to SharePoint environments. All signs point to Kofax contiuing to focus on image-enabling SharePoint environments and we look for more news on this front in the near future.

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.

DocPoint Recognized as Top SharePoint Integrator

DocPoint Solutions was recently recognized by TopSharePoint.com on a list of SharePoint consulting companies. From the press release, "According to the website, the list serves as a resource for organizations seeking a consulting company with SharePoint branding experience and a history of successful project implementations using the SharePoint platform. The complete list contains 53 U.S. and international firms known for their SharePoint expertise."

DocPoint, which was recently featured in our premium edition of DIR, specializes in building document imaging applications on top of platform. It is a spin-off of long-time imaging service bureau and systems integrator QAI. Both organizations are based in Fulton, MD.

Kodak Introduces New SharePoint Tools

Kodak continues to innovate on the SharePoint front, introducing two new tools for integrating document imaging technology with Microsoft's ECM platform. Kodak has introduced a Document Viewer Software for previewing documents returned by SharePoint searches. It works with 300 document types, so it's not liminted to images. Kodak has also introduced a Scan and View component, which enables users to enhance scanned images, run meta data searches, and mark-up and annotate documents.

This is exactly the type of functionality users need to turn SharePoint into an true document image management application. The new tools are designed to be integrated with Kodak's Capture Pro Software. Kodak recently introduced the ability to to import SharePoint Server library columns (meta data fields) to be used for indexing fields when capturing documents. All good moves on Kodak's part to capitalize on the growing desire to implement imaging functionality within SharePoint environments.

From the press release: "KODAK Document Viewer Software and KODAK Scan and View Software will be available beginning in May of 2011. Availability will vary by geographic location. For more information about KODAK Document Viewer Software and KODAK Scan and View Software, go to www.kodak.com/go/sharepoint."

MS SharePoint 2011 Conference Registration Open

I mainly note this because the 2009 conference, at which SharePoint 2010 was previewed, was one of the best conferences I've ever been too. There were more than 7,500 people there, it was sold out, there was a waiting list, and it was well run. Plus, we all got to see what was going to be included in SharePoint 2010 and why it is going to have such a large effect on the ECM industry as we know it.

I know I vacillate back and forth over how much influence SharePoint is going to have on the document imaging market, but after talking with a pair of SI's today, I am lifted back out of the trough of disillusionment and into being a believer again. Basically, it seems that to do true ECM in SharePoint, in anything close to an out-of-the-box way, you need to have 2010 installed. Currently, as the product just came out last year, that is not the case at many sites. Also, there seems to be a bit of a lack of knowledge out there about how to actually unleash SharePoint's true ECM capabilties.

Basically, the solution seems to be (and more on this in my next premium issue) marrying people with ECM process knowledge to SharePoint - so they can apply that knowledge to SharePoint applications. There are reasons this isn't happening full-force yet, but that could/should change in the future. (This is the kind of stuff I'll discuss.) Anyhow, here' s the link to the SharePoint 2011 MS Conference.

A lot of imaging players are sponsors, of the MS SharePoint event, incluidng KnowledgeLake, who's a platinum sponsor. KLake will be holding its own first ever user event in conjunction with the Microsoft event. The MS event runs Oct. 3-6 at the Anaheim Convention Center, with KLake's event being held the preceding weekend.

Speaking of events, SharePoint looks like it's going to have a huge presence at the upcoming AIIM Info 360 event being held at the D.C. Convention Center later this month. The floor plan shows like 25 ISVs (maybe some integrators in there) in the Microsoft Partner Pavilion, not to mention KnowledgeLake, which is next door. A quick look at the exhibitor list, shows like 138  total exhibitors, so once again it should be a good show for DIR and anyone else looking to do some networking.

Apparently, Hyland Software will be missing for the first time since I started covering the event for DIR back in 1998. That show was in Anaheim and from what I understand that was Hyland's first big coming out party after they had gotten a bunch of money from someone for their check imaging technology. At the show, then CEO Packy Hyland, Jr. handed me a card on which he listed his position as "One Happy Dude" and told me his goal was to grow Hyland larger than FileNet. They've certainly come pretty close. I'm not sure how much their really big AIIM booths over the years helped them, but apparently, they've moved on from that strategy.

Anyhow, ping me if you want to get together at AIIM

Cost of SharePoint

Spealking of the Real Story Group, parusing their blog, I came across this post from Alan Pelz-Sharpe, discussing some of the expenses associated with SharePoint implementations. Here's an excerpt that I found interesting: "The truth is that SharePoint is not a cheap option, no more so than any other document management or ECM system....What surprises both us and our customers is that SharePoint can sometimes present the most expensive shortlisted ECM option after a full cost analysis is undertaken."

This is not something I have heard many other places, but something I've always suspected. I think we need more cost analysis on SharePoint implementations in the transactional content management world.

KnowledgeLake Comments on ECM Magic Quadrant

Gartner's 2010 ECM Magic Quadrant Report has certainly generating a lot of buzz in our industry. Several vendors have released press releases touting their positioning in the Quadrant. As I've already commented, I thought it was a fairly good year for document imaging companies as image processing maintained the same weight (15%) in the rankings as the previous year and BPM actually increased 5% to 25%, while EDM and WCM components each dropped 5%. These seemed to be favorable changes, based on the make-up of most document imaging applications.

While imaging-for-SharePoint specialist KnowledgeLake was not ranked by Gartner, it was quick to weigh in on Microsoft's positioning as the ECM market leader. "Microsoft is leading this market and our decision to focus exclusively on Microsoft SharePoint has been a key to our success and has enabled us to experience 312% revenue growth since 2007," states Ron Cameron, president of KnowledgeLake. The KLake press release goes on to explain the KnowledgeLake is more than a "document capture," vendor, which is apparently how Gartner defines them.

According to the KLake press release the company, "provides a solution for managing the content of the electronic data within SharePoint as a Document Imaging solution. This includes the searching, viewing, securing, routing and annotating of mission critical electronic content. KnowledgeLake also differentiates itself by providing a unique offering for SharePoint searching by taking full advantage of both the native SharePoint Search and FAST Search providers, delivering pin-point accurate keyword and property search results on a single page."

One interesting observation is that Gartner seems to define SharePoint as a content management infrastructure and social content management tool. Knowledge's positioning is that it takes SharePoint and makes it a transactional content management tool. My observation has been that the new features in SharePoint 2010 also move it closer toward a tool that can be used for transactional content management applications, which is what document imaging has historically addressed best.

KLake Named to Inc. 5000

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

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

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

--Ralph

KnowledgeLake Honored by Microsoft

For the second straight year, St. Louis-based document imaging ISV has been honored by Microsoft in its Information Worker Solutions, Enterprise Content Management Partner of the Year category. For 2010, KnowledgeLake was named a finalist, after winninng the award last year. This year's winner was a company called Content and Code, out of the U.K., which seems to specialize in EDM and intranet solutions. KnoweldgeLake was one of three finalists.

KnoweldgeLake Partner and ECM/imaging roll-up, Global 360 was named the Visio Partner of the Year.

Laserfiche-Microsoft Complete DoD 5015 Testing

Document Imaging/ECM ISV Laserfiche has teamed with Microsoft to put together a records management solution that was recently tested by the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JOTC). The JOTC is in charge of the  DoD 5015.2 standard that is applied to RM solutions. The certification is typically mandated when doing business with the federal government, as well as state and local governments. Private entities have also been known to consider it.

If you remember, earlier this year, it was revealed that SharePoint 2010, which contains vastly improved RM capabilities, did not have all the right functionality required to achieve DoD 5015.2 certification. As a result, Microsoft began looking for partners to go through JOTC testing with. Laserfiche, whose software has been 5015 certified since 2003, was the first Microsoft partner to complete testing, which was done this week. The certification announcement should be upcoming.

SharePoint 2011 Conference Set

The Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 dates have been set. The event will held Oct. 3-6 in Anaheim. This is approximately two years after the very successful 2009 event, where SharePoint 2010 was previewed. 2010 is the version designed to be more scalable and manageable for document imaging applications.

Interestingly, in the promotional e-mail for the conference, Microsoft advertises SharePoint 2010 as "the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and Internet. "Learn how to apply the latest best practices for building and deploying solutions on the platform and find out how customers and partners are embracing cloud-based services to create value for their organizations."

So, for now, at least, it doesn't sound like anything new will be introduced. But, knowing Microsoft I would expect that to change.

Ralph 

Atalasoft Hires Ex-Captaris EVP Yantus

Massachusetts-based ISV Atalasoft has hired Paul Yantus as its president. Yantus, a former EVP at Captaris, is being brought in to help the company manage its growth and its push deeper into the SharePoint space. Atalasoft founder Bill Bither will remain as CEO.

Atalasoft was founded as a developer of .NET-based imaging tools and made a name for itself with its zero-footprint viewing capabilities. A couple years ago, it launched a zero-footprint viewer targeted at SharePoint applications. Yantus has been charged with growing this business.

When he was at Captaris, Yantus spearheaded the company's acquisition of the Oce Document Technologies, an OCR/ICR and document capture specialist. After the acquisition Captaris announced ambitious plans to leverage this technology to attack the SharePoint market, previewing several products at AIIM 2008. However, at the end of the year, Captaris was acquired by Open Text, which put the SharePoint efforts way on the backburner. Open Text has focused on leveraging the ODT technology in invoice capture apps for SAP and other ERP systems.

It looks like Yantus is being given a second chance to attack the SharePoint space with imaging technology. In a conversation with him earlier today he talked about bringing ECM capabilities to the SharePoint space. More on this strategy in our next premium issue.

ReadSoft and KnowledgeLake Announce Partnership

Two companies that have been fairly busy on the partnership front, have gotten together. Transactional content management (TCM)/imaging for SharePoint specialist KnowledgeLake has announced a partnership with invoice capture leader ReadSoft. Not sure of all the details yet, but it adds some serious invoice capture technology to KnowledgeLake's portfolio. KnowledgeLake recently announced a partnership with Global 360 that will beef up its BPM capabilities, so all the pieces are being put in place for SharePoint-based invoice processing applications. ReadSoft U.S., which recently formalized a reseller strategy after years of focusing primarily on direct sales (and with Kofax's increasing focus on direct sales, you might say they are attempting to seize an opportunity), has also recently done partnerships with Hyland Software and Altec.

SharePoint 2010 ECM Capabilities

Came across an interesting article/link to a blog post in today's issue of AIIM's on-line publication Infonomics. It's written by an ECM consultant who (going with an AIIM blog theme) earlier listed eight ECM requirements he wanted to see addressed with SharePoint 2010, and in this post he discusses how Microsoft addressed each of those requirements. His review, based on information he picked up during his attendance at October's Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009, which I also attended, is fairly favorable about the progress Microsoft is making toward providing ECM functionality. I came away from the event with a similar impression.

SharePoint Conference continued

Had to chance to attend a session yesterday given by the KnowledgeLake CTO and another KLake developer. They discussed some of the details behind SharePoint's improved document management features. A lot of scalability and search issues have certainly been addressed, as well as some records management stuff.We'll get into details in our newsletter, but suffice to say that with a few tools added on SharePoint can do a better job of image management than it historically has. Of course there is still no viewer and we're not sure the out-of-the-box workflow is quite there....

The session I presented on Imaging-enabling MOSS was a bit disappointing in the attendance. Of course, they moved the room following all eCopy's marketing efforts...anyhow, it sounds like some people are just starting to do basic document image and retrieval - at least our panel members from Nike and Arizona State were, but I still haven't seen much high-volume transaction content management in SharePoint.

Live From SharePoint Conference

This place is really alive. It's a nice change from most recent conference/exhibitions that I've been to. Instead of people complaining about how dead the event it, I'm seeing plenty of busy vendors here. I just sat through a full presentation in the Laserfiche booth - so the interest in imaging is obviously. I'm interested to see what sort of attendance I get at my panel presentation on image-enabling SharePoint in another hour or so.

The crowd is mostly an IT crowd, a lot of SharePoint integrators, both in-house and external contractors. The general consensus, granted, it's a fairly biased crowd, is that traditional ECM ISVs better embrace SharePoint or die. As expected SharePoint 2010 has plenty of document management upgrades. Apparently, even though 2007 represented a significant upgrade over past versions, it was still fairly short as Microsoft corporate VP Jeff Teper said the company tried to make as many improvements as possible based on the 20 document/content management suggestions it got.

This includes upgrades in areas like scabability, search, records management, workflow, and a few other areas.

More later.

SharePoint Conference

Well, we made it to Las Vegas for the Microsoft's second SharePoint Conference. Scheduled to be announced at this year's event is SharePoint 2010. The next generation of Microsoft' ECM/collaboration/portal platform. Preparing right now a keynote from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the launch. Last night's pre-conference exhibitor floor party was buzzing. Word is that there are something like 7,000 registrants here at the Mandalay Bay, and the registration lines certainly overwhelmed the staff. The exhibition floor was teeming with Microsoft developers and other IT types. There are quite a few document imaging vendors on hand. Last night we saw booths from KnowledgeLake, Hyland, Laserfiche, eCopy/Nuance, Kofax, Canon, Fujitsu, Kodak, EMC, GoScan, Psigen, AtalaSoft, Informative Graphics, SpringCM, BlueThread and I'm sure we're missing a few. Systems integrator KeyMark is also exhibiting.

Incidentally, we caught up with Mike Stuhley from GoScan who told us his company has developed a booming business capturing information on Swine Flu vaccines. He said GoScan, a fairly small Southern California-based ISV with a very easy-to-use capture interface, has landed something like five statewide contracts, as well as several counties...

This promises to be an exciting show, and we'll have complete coverage in our next newsletter.

Interview with EMC's CMO

Whitney Tidmarsh, EMC's Chief marketing office for its archiving and content management division, and a former marketing VP at Documentum, talks with Fierce Content Management about several hot topics in this interview. She touches on the emerging e-discovery preparedness market and how it relates to content management, EMC's relationship with Microsoft and its SharePoint strategy, as well as its cloud computing initiatives.

Ralph