Top Image Systems to Buy eGistics

Document capture ISV Top Image Systems (TIS) has announced plans to acquire cloud archiving specialist eGistics. TIS will pay approximately $18M for Dallas-based eGistics, which had 2013 revenue of $10.6M. eGistics has historically focused on the financial services market - which has also been the primary focus of TIS' recent North American efforts. TIS has also positioned itself as a cloud player in the capture space, so this acquisition dovetails nicely with what it has been trying to do.

TIS plans to leverage eGistics cloud infrastructure to rollout several of what is terms "smart processing applications" in areas like invoice processing, the digital mailroom, bill paying, account opening, mortgage processing, and employee onboarding. We recently detailed how TIS is partnering with workflow ISV K2 on SPAs that it is bringing to market. TIS also has plans to market its software to eGistics blue chip customer base, which reportedly includes "4 of top 5 U.S. banks."

The acquisition will triple TIS' U.S. headcount to more than 65 employees. According to TIS Executive Chairman Izhak Nakar, as quoted in a press release, "As a result of this powerful strategic combination, TIS Americas will be the largest business unit in terms of revenues. Reinforcing our commitment to growing our presence in the U.S. market, the acquisition significantly accelerates this important strategic initiative, giving us tremendous talent, two offices, and a more comprehensive suite of offerings to cross-sell to a broad installed base.”

The acquisition is expected to close in Q3 and be accretive to TIS' bottom line as eGistics reported a 2013 profit of $1.52M. eGistics shareholders will receive 50% cash and 50% stock from TIS. As of the end of Q1 2014, TIS had $15.7M on its balance sheet - more than $13M of which came from a recent public offering of ordinary shares.

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

New Kennedy Digital Archive

Today is being celebrated as the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address. That is the one that contains the line, "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country," among others. In honor of this anniversary, last week, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and the National Archives and Records Administration unveiled a digital presidential archive "providing unprecedented global access to the most important papers, records, photographs and recordings of President John F. Kennedy’s thousand days in office."

The new archive contains approximately 200,000 pages, 300 reels of audio tape containing over 1,245 individual recordings of telephone conversations, speeches and meetings, 300 museum artifacts, 72 reels of moving images and 1,500 photos. Technical details are available in this white paper. Technology partners participating include AT&T, Raytheon, Iron Mountain, and EMC. There are plans to digitize more materials as "staff and resources" become available. The library can be accessed at www.jfklibrary.org.

We'll conclude with this visionary quote by Kennedy, who seems to have predicted the rise of the document imaging industry, "through scientific means of reproduction…and this will certainly be increased as time goes on, we will find it possible to reproduce the key documents so that they will be commonly available…” Who knew?

PDF/A-2 Standard on Way

LuraTech recently sent us this link explaining some of the new features in the upcoming PDF/A-2 standard. PDF/A is the electronic document archiving standard that was approved by ISO in 2005, but to date as seen limited adoption in North America. The PDF/A Competence Center, of which LuraTech is a member, is hoping to change that.

The technical work on PDF/A-2 is apparently finished with the standard set to be published in early 2011. PDF/A-2 can be used on more complex documents including those with JPEG 2000 compression, open font types, and those including document collections. Overall, it should make PDF/A a more versatile standard and help drive more adoption.

2010 Census Forms on Track to be Saved as Digital Images

If you remember, after the 2000 U.S. Census, in which digital imaging was used for the first time to capture data from the forms, the forms were all transferred to microfilm before being submitted to NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) for long-term storage. This was after the Census Bureau had originally thought the digital images would be good enough for archiving. But, apparently, there was some disagreement over who would be in charge of ensuring that electronic images remained current, so a "human-readable" format - microfilm, was chosen.

Shortly thereafter, the PDF/A - A for "archiving" initiative was undertaken. We're not saying that NARA and the Census Bureau have agreed that PDF/A will be the long-term electronic format, but it's at least now an option - and over the past 10 years, people have certainly increased their focus on perserving electronic documents for lengthy periods of time.

Regarding the 2010 Census forms, which were once again captured digitally for data processing, early signs are that they will be archived as electronic images. From the timeline I've seen, most of the data extraction should be done by now and the information should be being prepared for submission to the President's office.

Here's an e-mail we recently received from the U.S. Census Bureau, ""The DRIS program considers all images used in the Census to be permanent records and has and will maintain them with links to the data throughout the life of the program. The referenced "blog" on the NARA website is a very accurate description of the activities being worked between Census and NARA to prepare the formal records schedule."

The "referenced blog" attempts to dispel some rumors that no images of the forms are going to be saved - only the data.

Ralph