http://www.capsystech.com/static.asp?path=5646

Friday, February 28, 2014

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.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

TIS Names New VP, Americas

Top Image Systems continues to evolve. The long-time document capture ISV, which has recently expanded into mobile capture with a focus on the banking industry, has named a new Executive VP and GM for TIS Americas. Avi Mileguir joins TIS from Click Software where he ran U.S. West region and Mexican sales for the past several years. Click Software, which markets a cloud-based workforce management software.

"We believe Avi's leadership skills and successful sales experience in cloud-based offerings will enable us to reach our revenue goals and align resources between our previous separate American branches," said Michael Schrader, TIS Chief Operating Officer, in the press release.

With the appointment, TIS has combined its Latin American and North American operations. It is also relocating Oren Ilan, its current VP of Global Engineering and who has been with the company for 14 years, to the U.S. to lead professional services for the Americas.

Mileguir's appointment seems to build on two recent developments at TIS:

Regarding eFLOW 5, here's what Schrader had to say about it when we interviewed him in September: "We changed our architecture from client/server to more of a full Web-based design. Our clients want to grow more and more into branch capture and scanning at the point of origin. In addition, we are sure businesses want to move more of their software into the cloud and SaaS and PaaS models. So, in general, it’s our goal to move all our software to a Web-based architecture and have it cloud ready." This meshes with Mileguir's cloud background.

The sale in Brazil was through a partner, Xerox, which will hopefully lead to more Latin American mobile imaging sales, so that meshes with Mileguir's Latin American sales experience.

Mileguir's appointment apparently displaces Omri Gelb, who had been managing TIS North American sales, most recently as GM of TIS' North American division.


Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Kofax Announces $4 Million TA & Analytics Deal

Today Kofax announced it had won a $4 million contract with a Western European-based "global wealth and asset management company." The deal includes Kofax's Total Agility 7.0 smart processing application (SPA) platform, as well as Kofax Analytics software (which is based on software from Altosoft, which Kofax acquired last year). It breaks down into $1.25M worth of software licenses and approximately $2.75M of maintenance, professional services, and training charges. The deal closed in Kofax Q2 (ended Dec. 31) and was delivered in January.

The software is being used to "capture, classify, process, act upon and analyze more than 20 million financial documents received from customers each year."

Certainly a solid deal for Kofax, especially because it includes two pieces of software that are separate from its legacy (as a capture ISV) and geared toward its future vision of serving the SPA market. That said, it's worth noting that software licenses made up less than one-third of the total price of the deal. Is this going to be the standard SPA sales model due to the complexity of the implementations? As a comparison to Kofax's legacy model, for the six months ended Dec. 31, software licenses made up about 40% of Kofax's total revenue with maintenance and professional services making up the remaining 60%. In that regard, the recent SPA deal doesn't seem like that big a departure from Kofax's traditional revenue model - although it's probably worth considering that the six-month period includes maintenance contracts related to more than 15 years of software sales, which should push that percentage higher than what you'd expect as related to a one-time deal. Do you know what I'm saying?

Anyhow, I guess it's natural that as Kofax moved into more complex SPA solutions its professional services revenue should rise - as in addition to more complexity, many professional services related to capture deals have historically been managed by resellers. It will be interesting to see how this affects Kofax's long-term profitability.


Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Investment Funds Manager Agrees to Buy BancTec

HandsOn3, which is described as "a Santa Monica, Calif., global manager of funds" has agreed to acquire BancTec. Based in Dallas, BancTec has been a long-time player in the document and check imaging hardware, software, and services space. Lately, it has tried to transition more of its business toward document outsourcing, which seems to have been the attraction for HandsOn3. HandsOn3 apparently already owns a BPO organization named Dataforce Group, "whose services include accounts receivable management, end-to-end auto insurance, and expense and benefits management."

The plan is to combine Banctec and Dataforce, which will create a $280 million company. It's worth noting that in 2011, the last year that BancTec filed an S-1 with the SEC, it alone was on target for more than $250 million in revenue. BancTec recently announced it had opened a new BPO center in El Paso to better handle its growing healthcare claims outsourcing practice.

According to the press release on the acquisition, "The current BancTec leadership and management team will remain in place and play a key role in the growth of the combined company."

BancTec executives are not discussing the acquisition until it is completed. In 2012 BancTec had an agreement to be acquired by document outsourcing and software specialist TransCentra, but the deal was never completed. BancTec is a sponsor at this year's AIIM Conference in early April and we are looking forward to catching up with them there.

Digitech Introduces New E-Forms, Upgrades Workflow

Digitech recently released a new version of its PaperVision Enterprise software, which includes new e-forms and improved workflow technology.  (Digitech's hosted ImageSilo offering is based on this platform.) These additions are designed to address the needs of Digitech's reseller channel, as well as end users, who previously had to rely on third party ISVs to provide this type of functionality.
 
Rebecca Wettemann, VP of Nucleus Research, had this to say about the new additions: “Many businesses have covered the basics of ECM and are now turning to additional options like workflow, electronic signatures, and e-forms to further boost the ROI from their technology investment,” she said. “Unfortunately, most have had to bolt together options from multiple vendors to get a complete solution. PaperVision Enterprise includes all three options as a seamless, fully-integrated suite, making it easier to share data between functions and easier to implement than a multi-vendor solution.”

Basically, with this latest release, Digitech is expanding the ECM capabilities it is offering its mid-market customers - a natural progression in any technology market.


Monday, February 24, 2014

Ease of use, network deployment highlight FineReader 12

(Article originally appeared in DIR 2/21/14 premium issue)
New network deployment capabilities, more accurate table extraction, improved efficiency features, and compatibility with Windows 8 are some of the highlights of ABBYY’s FineReader 12 OCR application, which was announced last week. “Our primary objective when we do a product refresh is to continue to increase accuracy,” said Angel Brown, director, product marketing for ABBYY’s OCR products. “We also want to add features that make the software easier to use.

“Also, while we’ve been making inroads with FineReader focusing primarily on the SOHO and SMB space, with the new release of our Corporate Edition, which has network installation capabilities, we expect to move deeper into the small enterprise and departmental level at large enterprises. End users now have the capability of rolling out systems for potentially thousands of users, and we will be offering volume licensing discounts. We’ve sold a lot of single user licenses over the years to organizations where we plan on going back and turning those into multi-user sites.”

FineReader 12 Corporate Edition starts at $399 to work with a dual core processor and $599 for a quad-core version. FineReader 12 Professional lists for $170. CDW, Ingram Micro, and the ABBYY direct store are the three most popular sales channels for the application.

Leveraging ABBYY’s ADRT (Adaptive Document Recognition Technology) IDR, FineReader 12 improves table recognition by up to 40%, which means users have to spend less time tweaking their results. Users can also save time by extracting items like tables and quotes without having to apply OCR to an entire document. Along those same lines, users can now extract text from single pages, while OCR processing of an entire document carries on in the background. 

Windows 8 compatibility means that the application can now leverage the latest PC touchscreen features. FineReader 12 Professional is available now, with the Corporate Edition due to become available next month.

For more information: http://bit.ly/FineReader12PR

Monday, February 17, 2014

ReadSoft 2013 Revenue Growth Flat; Recurring Revenue Percentage up 6%

ReadSoft announced its Q4 2013 and year-end numbers on Friday. Some highlights:
  • 2013 revenue was $118 million, which was basically flat, when considered in local currencies, compared to 2012.
  • License sales, when considered in local currencies, grew 1% to $38 million, or about a third of total revenue.
  • Recurring revenue, which includes both maintenance and subscription software and hosted software sales grew to $55 million, or 47% of total sales, up from 40.4% in 2012.
  • "U.S. and rest of the world" sales were basically flat in 2013 - at $35.5 million.
From CEO Per Ã…kerberg's comments:
  •  The global roll-out of XBOUND during 2013 took longer than expected and consequently we didn’t reach our full sales potential for this area
  • Although our 2013 results are not where we ought to be, we believe the investments we made and actions we took in acquisitions, employees, products and organization are essential to our long -term growth, results and margins
  • It is very gratifying to see that all the hard work on increasing our recurring revenues is continuing to pay off. This will have a very positive impact on ReadSoft’s future profitability. Our cash flow from operating activities remains strong. 
  • During the fourth quarter our markets in North America, Asia and South Africa have shown the way with good growth and profitability. 









Wednesday, February 12, 2014

TIS Announces P2P Deal with European Biopharma Company

One of Italy’s leading biopharmaceutical companies has selected Top Image Systems' eFLOW platform to  automate its P2P processes. This will include the capture of invoices, orders, contracts, and proof of delivery notes from thousands of suppliers at two locations in Italy. The eFLOW implementation will be integrated with the company's existing SAP and Microsoft SharePoint systems.

Read the full press release.

Monday, February 10, 2014

Perceptivce Lands $1.6M Invoice Processing Deal

Perceptive Software announced it has landed a $1.6 million invoice processing software contract with Doosan Infracore International. Doosan will implement Perceptive's Intelligent Capture (powered by Brainware), as well as Perceptive Content, which will manage workflow. Doosan is a Global 2000 company based in Seoul,  South Korea. It manufactures construction machinery. 

The Perceptive technology will be integrated with Doosan's Oracle and SAP systems. For the complete press release, click here.

“EDI provides a great deal of efficiency in reducing our paper volumes, but it will not work without a clean three-way match, and it’s simply not a feasible solution for our lower-volume vendors—which is to say, most of them,” said Jim Adkins, director of materials for Doosan. “Perceptive Software’s technology offers a great capability for keeping exceptions manageable, standardizing the workload for all territories and converting diverse paper documents to electronic data that is visible and processed with efficiency. We anticipate this project will remove a considerable amount of manual data entry from our routines, giving our staff more opportunities to pursue improvements for the shared services center.”

Monday, February 03, 2014

Large Mobile Capture Deals

Last week, we had Top Image Systems, in conjunction with its reseller partner Xerox Brazil, announce they had closed a deal for a 3,000 site mobile capture application involving the processing of contracts - presumably for mobile communications services. Today, Kofax announced it had landed a $1 million contract with a bank that is licensing its mobile capture technology. The bank is looking at deploying it an apps for check capture and deposit, bill paying, and new customer onboarding, and more.

These two deals are signs that the mobile capture market has evolved beyond checks and that mobile document capture is moving out of the planning and discussion stages and into the early real world adoption stage. This is also good news for vendors like Mitek and EMC, which also both recently launched new mobile capture initiatives. Mitek announced new bill paying app technology, while EMC launched the new Captiva Mobile Capture SDK-initially targeted at enabling its Captiva Capture customers to add mobile capture to their on-ramps.


Friday, January 31, 2014

Perceptive Software Shows Significant YOY Profit Improvement

From Lexmark's year-end/Q4 2013 report:

For 2013: Perceptive Software revenue was $224 million. Perceptive Software revenue, excluding acquisition-related adjustments of $16 million, was a record $239 million and grew 48% compared to 2012.

For Q4 2013: Perceptive Software revenue growth of 60% in quarter (70% non-GAAP, 15% organic growth), 43% in full year (48% non-GAAP).

From transcript of conference call (on SeekingAlpha.com):

"We delivered strong year-to-year improvement in Perceptive Software's profitability for the quarter and the year, and we expect continued Perceptive Software operating margin expansion in 2014 and beyond."

"Perceptive Software, delivered significant year-to-year improvement in profitability this quarter, up $9 million, driven by the 2 factors we've been focused on. First, we delivered solid Perceptive Software growth year-to-year, including good license revenue growth. Second, with the actions we started to take last year, we've been able to reduce Perceptive Software's organic cost and expense growth without negatively impacting revenue growth. And for the full year 2014, we expect to achieve double-digit software revenue growth and remain committed to delivering a positive and expanded software operating income margin."

FY2013:
"Perceptive Software had a slight operating loss of $2 million, an improvement of $23 million versus 2012. We expect continued substantial improvement in Perceptive Software operating income in 2014."

For 2014: "Perceptive will grow a bit faster than 15%, MPS a little less than that."

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.



Wednesday, January 29, 2014

DIR to Partner with Xamcor

You may have seen this press release that moved across the wire last week. From the article that appears in this week's premium DIR, "Xamcor [is] a leading M&A firm focused on the Information Management industry. DIR Editor Ralph Gammon will be providing content for the Xamcor Web site, including regular columns, executive interviews, and commentary on news releases.

"[I am] looking forward to helping Xamcor accomplish its mission of helping companies looking to be acquired receive maximum value for their entities, and, for those acquiring, finding good fits for their strategic plans. Xamcor was founded in 2012 by experienced ECM industry professionals Paul Carman and Harvey Spencer, along with Ike Fattal, who has a strong background in finance, deal structuring, and M&A."

I think that is all going to be fun, but, also check this out, which Xamcor apparently got with the issuing of the press release - yes, that's the Xamcor logo posted on a sign at Times Square. Cool.






From this Week's DIR: ECM as a Service and Enterprise Archiving

Here's a couple quotes that were thought were pretty cool from stories appearing in this week's premium edition of DIR:

From our story on the evolution of mobile scanner manufacturer Document Capture Technologies (DCT) towards more of a cloud-based services strategy: "“Basically, the goal is to take all the features of ECM and expose them as APIs that application developers can consume like any other service. This will change the economics of how ECM is delivered. Users will be able to pay as they go and add services.”

- Karl Etzel, COO, DCT

From a story on EMC's new InfoArchive enterprise archiving system: "Putting e-mail content in one silo and database content into another does not enable organizations to get their arms around all their information very effectively. InfoArchive represents a single unified archive that can support any unstructured content source and structured data source in one place. It’s a game changer in terms of providing full visibility into all information. It will enable next-generation solutions that are not isolated to leveraging one type of data.”

- David Mennie, EMC, IIG

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. 

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Panasonic introduces new Departmental models

Panasonic flies under the radar a lot in the document scanner market, but they continue to come out with some impressive new technology. Check out these new departmental models (80 and 100 ppm, list price  $5,195, and $6,195) that were introduced this week.

An impressive list of features in the press release:
  • ToughFeed: Stapled Document Detection, Ultrasonic Double-Feed Detection, Intelligent Feed Control and High Quality Feed Rollers ensure a smooth supply of paper into the scanner for efficient scanning.
  • Mechanical Deskew: Physically adjusts and corrects the skew of documents before scanning by the paper feed mechanism to reduce the need for rescans.
  • Paper Ejection Control: Paper exit roller reduces the speed of ejected paper and aligns it to prevent paper jams or the loss of originals.
  • Hardware Image Processing: Performs image enhancements and prevents scanning speed degradation by maintaining workflow efficiency at 300 and 200 dpi
  •  Auto-Preview / Auto-Rescan: Automatically produces nine different versions of a scanned document and displays them as thumbnails. Users select the most suitable image with a single click with no time loss. Similarly, users can adjust the quality of an image via the thumbnails without having to rescan the original thereby saving time and improving productivity.
  •  Notification Function: Automatically detects problems with scanned images including binary/color, binary image, blank page and unique page detection using four notification functions and displays warning icons using Panasonic Image Capture Plus software.
  • Additional productivity features include Automatic Glass Cleaning, Self Cleaning Ionizer, and One Touch Scanning for up to 100 programmable scanning workflows.
  • The new models include Panasonic’s proprietary Active Double-Feed Roller Prevention, LED scanning illumination, Advanced Image Processing, and Image Capture Plus technologies (easy-to-use data formats, automatic image orientation and OCR Zone function).

Monday, January 13, 2014

Websocket to Replace NPAPI for Chrome Scanning

DynamSoft, the developer of the Dynamic Web TWAIN SDK for embedding scanning capabilities in Web-based applications, is in the process of developing a WebSocket solution to enable its customers' applications to continue to work with Chrome browsers. DynamSoft was forced to go this route due to Google choosing to no longer support NPAPI in its latest Chrome browser versions.

From a recent article provided by DynamSoft to DIR: "Google’s decision to no longer support NPAPI required a quick address by Dynamsoft. As a result, we at Dynamsoft have concluded we will leverage the WebSocket protocol to enable document scanning in newer non-NPAPI Chrome browser versions. The WebSocket protocol is part of HTML5 and the latest versions of Chrome support HTML5."

Read a full explanation of DynamSoft's WebSocket strategy for creating browser-based scanning.

Tuesday, January 07, 2014

DIR Top Stories of 2013: 7 thru 10

Here are the final three of our top 10 Document Imaging stories for 2013 as covered in DIR. (Here are links to posts on our top, second, and third, as well as fourth through sixth top stories):


7. Captricity Secures Round of Financing: Berkeley, CA-based ISV that specializes in automating data entry leveraging crowdsourcing, announced a $2.4 million round of financing led by The Social+Capital Partnership, a Palo Alto-based group founded by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya.

8. Kofax Hires New CMO; Former Kofax CMO Joins ReadSoft: Okay, it wasn't quite that cut and dried, but these hirings happened within about a month of each other. Former FileNet and Pagasystems executive Grant Johnson joined Kofax in October in the wake of the resignation of Martyn Christian. Then a month later, Andrew Pery, who worked as Kofax CMO from 2006-2010, joined ReadSoft full-time after working there as a consultant for almost a year. Additionally, in 2013, former ReadSoft Marketing Manager Alayne Pregeant joined TIS.

9. BancTec Lands Its Largest Scanner Deal Ever: This was a cool story as the Dallas-based imaging hardware, software, and service provider sold more than 30 high-volume scanners, through a reseller partner, to a Japanese shared services center. The kicker is that the center was opened in the Fukushima Prefecture, where a partial nuclear meltdown occurred in 2011, in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami.

10. TWAIN Working Group Launches Driverless Scanning Initiative:  Pam Doyle, Chair: "We are working on changing the conversation and taking out native drivers. We want to make the conversation occur directly between an application and a scanner. This will eliminate the need to develop drivers for multiple platforms.”

 




Monday, January 06, 2014

Top DIR Stories 4 thru 6: A Pair of Acquisitions & Flesh Eating Bacteria

Top DIR stories of 2013, numbers 4 through 6:

4. Hyland Acquires AnyDoc Software: Hyland, a BPM and ECM specialist with strong document imaging technology, had been developing its own advanced capture technology. It decided to ramp up its development efforts with the acquisition of forms processing industry pioneer AnyDoc. "We’ve been really pleased with the progress of our capture product," said Bill Priemer, long time Hyland sales exec who was promoted to CEO in 2013 with the retirement of A.J. Hyland. "But, we only had three years of development in advanced capture, which, by industry standards, gives us an application that is considered rather basic."

5. JBIG2 Compression Causes Major Headache for Xerox: The implementation of this advanced compression technology in Xerox's MFPs caused quite a stir when a German computer scientist found that it had altered the numbers on several blue prints he was scanning. One journalist went so far as to compare a “document-altering scanner” to “flesh-eating bacteria." This was probably an exaggeration, and the character changes apparently occurred only when more aggressive compression settings were turned on with smaller font and "stressed" documents. Nonetheless, Xerox eventually pulled non-lossless JBIG2 compression from its devices - kind of a bummer because the technology really has some tremendous document compression potential and is still utilized by many organizations through software implementations.

6. DocuWare acquires Westbrook: Westbrook was apparently up for sale due to some financials obligations by its principal owner - Allen & Co. Like AnyDoc, Westbrook was a pioneer in the document imaging industry, but had fallen on some tougher times recently. It did, however, maintain a strong relationship with Ricoh -  a partnership that was orginally formed with IKON more than 10 years ago. This relationship was very attractive to DocuWare, which has had much success in recent years through partnerships with MFP dealers, but did not have a formal relationship with Ricoh. Westbrook is currently operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of DocuWare.



Friday, January 03, 2014

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.