Ephesoft Announces Large Deal

A couple months ago when we profiled the Ephesoft in our premium newsletter, CEO Don Field had told us that the open source intelligent data capture (IDC) start-up had recently bid-on and won a large deal in which it competed against several leading established capture companies. Not sure if this is the result of that, but, it nonetheless sounds like an impressive deal, involving 450 million pages of mortgage files for a BPO.

Apparently, this BPO is putting a big ephasis on Linux and open source which gave Ephesoft the advantage. From the press release, "The current Ephesoft system uses Linux-based web servers and Windows-based Application Servers," said Ike Kavas, founder and CTO of Ephesoft. "However, they are planning to have a 100% Linux platform to support their business. Since Ephesoft is the only platform today that can deploy an IDC system running on Linux and work with other open source systems such as Ubuntu and RedHat, partnering with Ephesoft was the logical choice. "


Also from the press release, "The solution will process over 450 million pages of mortgage files by automatically classifying and separating a wide variety of document types and then extracting key metadata for further processing. Searchable PDFs will be created in a tabbed format and deposited into their IBM Content Manager ECM."

Open Source Capture

We've been hearing some good buzz around Alfresco, an open source ECM venture launched a few years back by some ex-Documentum developers in the U.K. Yesterday, we saw this announcement about an open source capture venture launched by Kofax's former head of professional services. We caught up with the CTO of Ephesoft this afternoon and will have more on them in our next premium issue.

Basically, Ephesoft offer a automatic document classification and extraction software in two flavors: a Community and an Enterprise edition, which carries an annual maintenance fee and comes with support and the RecoStar OCR engine from Open Text Document Technologies.