AIIM 2006

So, I'm stuck here in the Erie Airport, waiting for my departing flight to Philly - what a great time to blog. Yup, headin' down to AIIM On Demand - the second year at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. I actually enjoyed last year's show immensely and found Philadelphia easy to get around. (Sorry for any mistakes that follow, need to go through security. We're moving.)

Apparently, there are some T-storms going on this way. Hope your flight isn't too badly delayed. Fortunately, I'm flying direclty there and not using it as a connection, because (Philly is a U.S. Air hub), the people in front of me in line were really screwed up. I'm just going to use my down time here as a substitute for sitting in Starbucks this afternoon and catching up on things and prepping for the show. (Flight from Philly just landed close to on time, but still we're delayed for an hour. Don't quite get it, but oh well.)

Two interesting announcements in preparation for the show this week. The first comes from Kofax, which has finally officially announced it Document Scan Server. The Scan Server is a hardware/software appliance designed to replace ISIS and TWAIN drivers with SOA calls directly to the device. In other words, instead of having to configure a TWAIN interface into your accounting application, you can just write some SOA/Web services calls to get the image. Like a lot of things these days, the Scan Server is designed to bring document imaging further into the mainstream. "No longer do you need a developer that specializes in ISIS or TWAIN, now you can get any engineer that knows standards-based Web services to do you image enablement [enable your application to receive document images directly from a scanner]." That's a big of a paraphrase, but that's pretty much what Anthony Macciola of Kofax told us. It's an interesting venture by Kofax, whose Image Controls driver business has morphed into VRS, and which has cooperted very closely with ISIS Master Developer Pixel over the past few years. It appears Kofax wants its driver buisness back. It definitely has the partnerships with the scanner vendors in place to make this happen.

Kofax partners seem pretty excited about the Document Scan Server, and we recently had an opportunity to talk with an integrator that has had the Boy Scouts of America commit to buying like 250 Scan Servers. Kofax preliminary pricing was $1,000 per unit - but they stressed that volume discounts will be made. The ROI comes in the areas of integration and maitenance, as the Scan Server is designed to enable true server-based deployment and maiteance of Server-based capture. Plenty more on this in my next issue, which comes out tomorrow.

Interestingly, Datacap also made an SOA-centric announcment today. It make it TaskMaster flagship application available as a service. (I apologize, I couldn't find it as a link, so here's the complete text:

Datacap Releases Taskmaster Web Service,
the Industry’s First SOA Capture Solution

On Demand Image Processing, Recognition, Validations and
Export Formatting for any Platform

May 15, 2006, Tarrytown, NY – Datacap announced today the release of Taskmaster Web Service, a new approach for users to capture document images via the Internet. Whether an organization is running FileNet Capture, Kofax Ascent Capture or another capture product, they can expand their capture capabilities whenever and wherever needed simply by calling the Web service.

“Datacap continually leverages key technology developments to provide maximum flexibility to organizations looking to increase data-entry and document-indexing efficiency and accuracy,” said Datacap CEO Scott Blau. “Taskmaster Web Service brings a whole new level of flexibility. Users can take advantage of Datacap’s procedural rules engine to control document identification, field recognition, data validation, and export formatting – all without any programming.

Taskmaster Web Service takes advantage of the Service Oriented Architecture trend to decouple traditional forms processing and advanced document capture capabilities from the capture platform. This makes it easy to set up rules that will run exactly the same on documents whether they are scanned locally or remotely, whether they are processed in one capture system, such as Kofax Ascent Capture, or another, like Datacap Taskmaster. Simplified rules administration – without programming – means less administrative overhead for a capture application. Centralized, Web-service based processing also makes it easier to monitor multiple capture applications efficiently sharing the same resources.

Those using FileNet Capture, Kofax Ascent Capture or other capture platforms can use Taskmaster Web Service to add enhanced capture capabilities not standard in their existing platforms. As user needs change, organizations can add the capture pieces they need via the Web Service. Taskmaster Web Service integrates with third party capture platforms and can easily provide added capabilities, saving organizations the expense and effort of replacing their existing capture investment.

An early adopter of the Taskmaster Web Service has built an application that sends fax images to the Service to capture addressee information with advanced recognition. The fax management application was developed independently as a Microsoft .NET executable. The functionality for natural handwriting recognition was added with only a few lines of code to call the Web Service and interpret the results.

Availability
Taskmaster Web Service is available immediately. For pricing and system requirements, contact Datacap at sales@datacap.com.

Comment: This application would seem to be the perfect compliment to the Document Scan Server, as it puts the entire data capture portion of document imaging on a servier - makes it available as a service. So, once you capture the image with one of these Scan Servers, you feed it to Datacap and off you go.

Ralph

Good quarters

Capture specialists Dicom and Top Image Systems both announced strong first quarters - another sign of the current stength of the imaging industry.

Also, I'll apologize in advance for anyone I miss at the upcoming AIIM show in Philly next week.

Thanks.

Ralph

Carman at Computhink

Congrats to Paul Carman, who has accepted the job a president of Computhink. Computhink is a Chicago-based document imaging/workflow/records management software vendor. Last I knew, they were trying to build a VAR channel. I actually applied for a business development job there a few years back, but was turned down. Always thought Chicago would be a cool place to live. Paul's been around the imaging block, so to speak, a few times. He started with Kodak, moved into the IMC, which he helped sell to AIIM, was with an ASP firm for awhile, and most recently has been an EVP with Document Boss - a job search/M&A organization based in the U.K. We wish Paul the best in his latest endeavor and are looking forward to catching up.

Pegasus Releases Latest toolkit version

Improved .NET functionality, better support for thumbnail viewing and improved image processing.

INSCII acquisiton completed

In case you were wondering what happened to the old INSCII high-volume COLD and document imaging business...

Secure document imaging

Talking about introducing more security into your processes...

Forms processing news

Here's a story from ReadSoft, about an invoice processing installation that leverages the company's links into the Microsoft Great Plains accounting system.

Also, Datacap and FCPA have gotten together with an organization for accounts payable professionals to put together a survey on invoice processing. I coundn't find a link, so here's the text:


End-User Survey on Invoice Scanning and Capture Sponsored by Datacap, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. and IOMA
Analysis and Report to Be Presented By Power Decisions Group
Tarrytown, NY – May 4, 2006 – Datacap Inc. announced today that it has partnered with the Institute of Management Administration (IOMA) to conduct the industry’s first customer data-driven survey exclusively focused on invoice scanning and data capture benefits, success factors and barriers. The survey is being distributed to more than 50,000 accounts payable, financial management and IT professionals worldwide throughout the month of May.



With more than 19,000 members, IOMA provides practical information to the accounts payable profession, including the Report on Managing Accounts Payable newsletter, special reports, conferences, and training seminars. The IOMA/TAPN Accounts Payable Certification Programs have enabled thousands of AP professionals to prove their skills and distinguish themselves by passing a comprehensive exam. “This survey is a great supplement to our own ongoing research,” said Andrew Dzamba, IOMA’s Editor of Accounts Payable publications. “We expect this survey to provide the most detailed information to date on how AP managers are leveraging scanning and capture technology to streamline AP and reduce cost.”



Survey results will be analyzed and interpreted by Power Decisions Group, a marketing research firm, based in San Francisco. The survey results will be presented in a special report, published in May 2006. Datacap, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. and IOMA will also sponsor a webinar in June to present findings from the report. The finished report will be made available to all survey participants free of charge. “We welcome Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. and IOMA in recognizing the importance of end-user research, particularly in this high growth segment of the capture market” said Arthur Gehring Director of Marketing at Datacap.



Analyst firm Aberdeen Group has benchmarked more than 875 companies and investigated several dozen enterprise-AP strategies and the use of supporting technologies. According to a recent Aberdeen report, “Electronic Invoicing Solution Selection Report: Leading an Accounts Payable Extreme Make Over,” electronic invoicing strategies, including scan and capture, can reduce accounts payable transaction cost between 63% and 67%. Survey data revealed that: “79% of AP managers see ‘automation’ as the key enabler to future success.”



The goal of the Invoice Capture study is to identify current behavior and the key factors driving organizations in their invoice scanning and capture decisions. The survey was designed to encompass those who have already embarked on an invoice capture strategy as well as those who are examining its feasibility.



To participate in this survey and receive a free copy of the survey results when available – visit www.datacap.com/survey.

About Datacap
Since 1988, Datacap Inc. has provided leading document capture and forms processing software solutions to organizations worldwide. Datacap Taskmaster software efficiently transforms paper into information, increasing efficiency and data accuracy while reducing costs and document cycle time. A client/server, rules-based capture workflow platform, Taskmaster provides highly flexible solutions for both document image indexing and data entry automation. Taskmaster also enables scanning and indexing from a browser and integrates with all leading document management solutions, databases and ERP systems. http://www.datacap.com/

IOMA
IOMA is the acknowledged leader in providing practical information to the accounts payable profession. From Report on Managing Accounts Payable newsletter and our numerous special reports to its highly-regarded conferences and training seminars, IOMA’s contributions to AP education are considered the gold standard around the world. The IOMA/TAPN Accounts Payable Certification Programs have enabled thousands of AP professionals to prove their skills and distinguish themselves by passing a comprehensive exam. All IOMA AP products offer APCP certification CEU credits. http://www.ioma.com



About Fujitsu
Fujitsu is a leading provider of customer-focused IT and communications solutions for the global marketplace. Pace-setting device technologies, highly reliable computing and communications products, and a worldwide corps of systems and services experts uniquely position Fujitsu to deliver comprehensive solutions that open up infinite possibilities for its customers' success. Headquartered in Tokyo, Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 4.8 trillion yen (US$40.6 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2006. For more information, please see: http://www.fujitsu.com

About Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc.
Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. conducts engineering and marketing activities in Sunnyvale, CA and sales operations throughout the United States. Fujitsu Computer Products of America currently offers products and services including scanners and scanner maintenance, hard disk drives, Magneto-Optical drives, palm vein recognition technology and 10Gb Ethernet switches. Fujitsu Computer Products of America is located at 1255 East Arques Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA, 94085. For more information about Fujitsu products and services, call us at 800-626-4686 or 408-746-7000. For more information, please see: http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com

About Power Decisions Group
Power Decisions Group is a market research company focused on marketing strategy. Using market research and decision clarification tools, PDG stays focused on each client’s decision-making agenda. Clients benefit from the right marketing research information for uncovering marketing strategy solutions that work. http://www.powerdecisions.com

LIRR Personnel Records Lost

I guess this could be an argument in favor of document imaging. Iron Mountain seems to have lost personnel data for 17,000 Long Island Transit Authority workers. There also seems to be some discrepancy as to whether it was a theft of an accident.

Cut Off Date For Rooms at AIIM

This year's AIIM Conference and Expo is fast approaching, and Questex Media Group, which is putting on the event, asked us to remind attendees and exhibitors that they rooms they have blocked off need to be reserved by Friday,April 21, or they will be released. The Expo is set to run Tuesday May, 16 through Thursday May 18, with the Conference starting on Monday. If you need to make hotel reservations, please try this link.
Thanks.

Ralph

Faxes

Do you ever wonder why with all this great and affordable document scanning technology available that people continue to use fax machines. Well, let me tell you a story about something that happened to me this morning. I think it illustrates why: At about 5 a.m. I guess (or so my wife told me), my office phone started ringing. I woke up around 7 and sure enough, it's still ringing. So, I go downstairs and answer a call, figuring it must be something important. Turns out it was someone trying to call a bank. Okay, strange that they would have been calling since five, but I tell them sorry, wrong number. Then, in quick succession I get like five more similar calls. Finally, I ask, "what number are you calling?" and the person says 866-2247-1234 or something. The mistake is obvious. Apparently, the bank had today changed its number and this was the new toll free number, but these people didn't realize you had to dial "one" first and the locals were being connected to my line after dialing the first seven digits. So, I disconnect my phone, leaving a message for people to call my cell phone.

This afternoon the bank calls. They apologize and tell me they have cancelled the number after Verizon said they couldn't change their automated message to tell callers to dial "1" first. In Verizon's opinion, it should have been obvious to callers that they needed to dial "1." Well, I can attest that it certainly was not. Similarly, it may seem obvious to us that people should scan instead of fax, but guess what?

Just keep that in mind.

Thanks.

Ralph

Here's a nice contract won recently by SourceCorp.Also, EFI and Nuance just announced a partnership. Once of Nuance's goals to make PaperPort the universal client for desktop document management.

eCopy Paper Connection

A boatload of news came out of eCopy's Paper Connection event held last week in Ft. Lauderdale. This includes new connectors for ECM applications from Hyland, FileNet, and Documentum (the AIX/OTG stuff.) There is also a new SharePoint connector. LaserFiche and one of its partners were presented with a developer's award. There were also several vertical market-oriented best practices awards given to end users. Finally, Konica Minolta and Lanier both announced they would begin distributing ShareScan. Here's a link to the releases.

Kofax Transform

Just finished up attending Kofax's annual Transform reseller event in not-so-sunny Southern California. Was a very solid event held at Dana Point - a resort town just south of LA. Kofax made plenty of exciting product announcements that will showing up in the next few issues of DIR, as they become available for public consumption. Here's one that's good to go now. It involves Adobe's LiveCycle Barcoded Forms product. Sounds like Adobe is having some success using this product to combine e-forms and paper forms applications. Tax processing was the first big market we I.D.'d. Healthcare seems like it also might be a fertile area. Signature requirements on e-forms that could otherwise be submitted electronically are the big driver. Kofax resellers will now be able to sell an Ascent-embedded version of the product.

Also, at the event, Visioneer launched its first official departmental model - although there seems to have been some confusion between Visioneer and Infotrends about where a couple of its existing models fit into the market. The new 632 bosts a legal-sized flatbed and is rated at 35 ppm/70 ipm for a list of just under $2,000.

Ralph

AIIM Distributed Capture Webinar

Yes, we've heard a lot of talk in our industry about distributed capture and its benefits. But here's a Webinar that promises to explore some of its dark side. Sounds good, because I've definitely talked to a few systems administrators who have been more than happy to extol their reasons for not liking distributed catpure.

Microsoft and ODF

People are probably right to be suspicious of this.

Digital Camera Capture

ABBYY has licensed its OCR software to scanR - this company that offers to convert document and whiteboard images captured with digital cameras - into searchable PDFs.

New Canon Workgroup Scanner

Canon seems to be competing directly with some of HP's lower-end models with this one.

E-mail archiving numbers

Ten-fold growth in four years - from $796 million this year to almost $8 billion in 2010.

Xerox, Visioneer in the News

It looks like Xerox has introduced another interesting update to its DocuShare ECM product. We've generally heard good things about this inexpensive platform and it looks like they've hit quite a few hot points with version 5.0. This includes improved collaboration, workflow, and records management. Also, hats off to Visioneer Sales and Marketing VP Don McMahan for his recognition by CRN. Seems, the sheer number of VARs Visioneer has signed up in the past year has attracted some attention. Looks like another big year for workgroup scanner sales all around.

Fujitsu mid-volume production scanner

Ran across a couple interesting things while doing some Web research today. First, this listing for the fi-5900C has shown up on the FCPA Web site. Looks like FCPA is trying to go upstream pretty far and compete with the higher end Kodak i600 and Bowe Bell & Howell Spectrum stuff. I'm assuming they're going to come in with a very attractive price, because I haven't heard too many poor performance reports about the two aforementioned scanners. Also, it seems Bowe Bell & Howell has expanded its support agreement Kodak.

ACS Child Support

ACS continues to dominate the child support payment processing market. We recently did a story discussing how they had licensed some technology from Denver-based Open Scan, after Open Scan beat them out for a few contracts.

Homeland security

This is interesting. I know document imaging, taxonomy, and search companies all stood to benefit from upgraded homeland security. I guess this begs the question - because our technology actually saves money, does it become more imperative in these types of processes now?

Googe Buys Word Processing Company

What do you think the desktop is going to look like in 10 years?

SAT Snafu

Here's an article that details some of the reasons for the mistakes that were made recently on SAT scoring. It seems less-than-perfect OMR performance is at least partially to blame. Pearson NCS gets hit pretty hard in this article.

Here's the response we got from Scantron's Tim Dubes when we asked him to comment on the situation:

"While we really don't want to be perceived as grave dancers--and keep in mind that even state of the art OMR is not going to produce 100% accurate results in all applications--there appears to be a number of areas that the SAT test scoring system could be improved. Remember that this is a complete solution that is being called into question, not just individual technologies. So while a significant technology advancement like Scantron's SIMR (Scantron's Intelligent Mark Recognition) can greatly improve recognition accuracy in less than optimal conditions (including damaged forms, lower confidence marks, damaged tracking marks, and the like), it is only part of an overall solution. In the case of the SAT scoring, the inability of the software to accurately flag degraded forms and marks that fall below the necessary confidence threshold could have contributed to the poor results.

"One of the key points that Scantron makes to our customers, particularly in the education field, is accountability. This means that we are responsible for all the components of the solution: we make the software application, we build our own hardware, we design & print the forms in our own facility, and we provide complete training and professional services with our own employees. Sole source accountability removes a lot of variables, and allows us to control the data capture environment, whether we are installing a customer-driven solution or providing the complete data collection solution on an outsourced basis. This also eliminates a lot of the variables from cross-vendor solutions and gives Scantron and it's customers the confidence to move forward with recognition-based technology for mission critical applications. I'm certain that the students' that are negatively affected by the SAT scoring issue would consider it to me a mission critical application."

SourceCorp acquired

This was probably bound to happen in light of the proposed acquisition activity recently surrounding ACS. Private investors seem to have developed an affinity for service businesses over the past year. Over the past year, SourceCorp seems to have put their house in order and had a good strong third quarter of '05. Wonder who could be next?

New capture devices

I'd say new scanners, but actually, Kodak's new device is a network scanstation. Here's a review of it by our friend Doug Henschen at Intelligent Enterprise.
Also, HP, the original network scan-only device vendors with their Digital Sender, have announced three new workgroup scanners. Yes, they've added true duplex capabilities and also introduced a new sheet-fed only model. The capture software, aimed at the desktop user is pretty cool also.

More detail in next week's DIR.

Stellent Dividend

This is kind of wierd. Incidentally, it seems to have helped the stock price, which has been climbing steadily since last May.Is this some kind of a new trend? Will we see more ECM companies following suit? Or, is Stellent just trying to differentiative itself and get more notice on the stock market? At the end of the year, they only had $60 million in cash and short-term investments in the bank, so they're not exactly flush with cash. We thought they might use some of that to buy a capture vendor. A dividend? Well, if it works...

RG

Dicom News

Big news out of the Dicom Group in the last couple of days. First off, on Tuesday, they announced the acquisition of LCI, an IDR software developer out of Germany. The company seems to advertise technology similar to that of SWT. It was founded by academics, however, and like Mohomine, and to some extent Neurascript, was more technology than marketing driven it appears - although Kofax told me LCI has some 70 customers.

Then, today, Dicom announced it would be discontinuing its Samsung distribution business - the SGA portion of its business. This has been in the works for a long time, and the division had been up for sale, but apparently no buyers. Once again, I'll give Dicom tremendous props for their vision to move out of this business - which I think is how the company started - and into document imaging. Ironically, it seems to have taken the hiring for a former distribution as CEO - Rob Klatell who spent more than 30 years as an executive a components distributor Arrow Electronics - to ring the final bell for SGA. I guess Klatell knows a healthy distribution arrangement when he sees one...

TIS Posts Strong 4th Quarter

Dare we say that Top Image Systems looks like its in pretty good shape? The company recently posted a fairly strong fourth quarter, has $8 million in the bank, and appears to be headed in the right direction for both growth and profitability. I'd compared them to Captiva a few years back, but they are still a bit too small. OF course, Top Image has also struggled for years to establish a foothold in North America. But now that they have established themselves in Japan, and seem to have turned a corner, maybe NA is next - with acquistion or merger being the best route.

I wonder if EMC knows who they are?

Ricoh Awards

This is pretty cool. A lot of these guys offer document capture solutions. I guess all it takes is 100-grand to get some serious traction on your embedded copier solution. I betcha' Canon wishes they would have done this with MEAP. Just kidding. We'll wait to see some of these products out on the market before we pass judgment.

TIS Lands Invoice Deal

Looks like Top Image Systems has landed another smokin' huge invoice processing deal.

IBM MFPs

It appears IBM is entering the MFP hardware business. Wonder who they are OEMing from? The eight-inch color touchscreen for scanned image previews sounds pretty cool.

Planet Adobe?

Check out the new Acrobat users group site.

Scientigo customer

It seems our friends at Scientigo have landed another customer. Scientigo is an IDR capture developer that we profiled a couple months ago. They are also the guys who claim to have patented XML. Their latest customer is Critical Technologies, on Oklahoma City-based software developer that formerly were the FilesOnTheNet ASP guys. Like Scientigo, they seem to be a fairly small organization with some solid technology.

Imaging In Healthcare

I love this, this HIS vendor has released an "enteprise-wide document management system" that's called "Department Imaging."

Also, here's a Dallas-based ECM vendor that has released a healthcare specific document and image management system.

It seems the HIMSS (Health Information Management Systems Society) conference is taking place in San Diego this week.

Check out the 7th paragraph in this article... The one that starts with Virtua Health. "More recently, Virtua selected Initiate to perform file analysis and eliminate fragmented and duplicate records as part of its move toward a document imaging system." I'd be interested to know exactly what that involves...

RG

Open Source Systems

Here's an interesting post about a college kid who's pretty proud of his $125 document imaging system. No, it's not going to stand up to enterprise stress, but it's a neat starting point, and I think a peek into the future.

Also, it appears Alfresco, the Open Source DM specialist founded by former Documentum execs, has secured some more funding. I don't know, but the $8 million figure seems like a low amount for such an ambitious venture, but maybe we're harkening back to the dot-com days when VCs had money in wheelbarrows. Then again, Alfresco (from when we talked with them) seemed to have a pretty efficient business model, so maybe they don't need that much.

RG

AnyDoc Opens U.K. Office

Here's another former Captiva salesperson surfacing at AnyDoc.

Can Reynolds be far behind?

Not that Mr. Bish is going to end up at AuthentiDate, but I guess you never know, they do have some pretty good technology... Anyways, I was a bit surprised to see that one of Captiva's top salesmen had taken a job with docSTAR. docSTAR is an SMB targeted application - so at least it's in a high growth area of the market, but it's clearly a much less established business than Captiva was.

Dicom posts solid results

Looks like Dicom Group is back on track after a down first quarter.

Recent news

Here's an interesting story announcing John Harland acquiring an ECM software vendor. Harland is an $800 million entity that has a financial services software business, Harland Financial Solutions (HFS), that acquired Mitek Systems' check and imaging business a couple years back. Harland corporate also owns Scantron. I wonder of the Mitek stuff wasn't working out.

Also, here's a deal between a couple companies we saw at Visioneer's recent partner event.

Kodak Breakaway

At the Kodak Breakaway 2006 show. Their resellers extravaganza for Document Imaging. Had a lot of great converstations here. It's really a well attended event. I think there were like 500 people. Last night was the ISV show and there was plenty of new blood exhibiting. We saw Cabinet NG there, advertisting its imaging for QuickBooks. Also saw FileBound, maybe somebody called Scanning America. There were also a lot of old school resellers in the house.

Sat on a media panel the past couple days with Harvey Spencer, Ken Congdon, Brian Sherman, Ron Galz of IDC, Mike from InfoTrends, and even Doug Henschen was in the house for the first day. (I apologize for any misspelled names.)

Big concern of the VARs in the audience was digital copier dealers and how to compete with them. My basic view is that a decent scanning soluiton on a digital copier can be expensive and that resellers can definitely compete on price with workgroup scanners and know-how about the imaging industry.

The other big point I was trying to make, and I don't know if I had the full support of the rest of the panel on this, was that VARs need to focus vertically if they want to thrive in the next 10 years. Imaging as a horizontal solution is becoming a commodity. And new protocols in areas like SOA, XML, and Web services are going to make it easier to "image-enable" vertcle packages. This is where the margins are going to be.

Recently spoke with a VAR CSI, down here in FL, that has sold a tremendous redaction solution to some county courts that automates a process associated with a new regulation. These guys seem way ahead of the game on this and their sales number are up like three times thanks to it. They were already working with the courts on some extraction stuff, and because they were focused were able to come up with this redcaction thing. So, now they have a repeatable solution (even filed for some patents) that they can sell around the country. It's driving revenue and I'm assuming it's driving profits.

RG

DRS Acquires Peladon

Peladon Software, out of San Diego, has got a pretty nice buyout from U.K.-based DRS. Peladon is the intelligent forms processing sofware developer that was founded by some former Mitek employees, as well as a U.K.-based Mitek partner. Peladon has created a fairly effective IDR application working with a variety of recognition engines. Peladon has a "high-confidence character inspection" module that we featured in a post-AIIM issue.

Peladon seemed to have a decent install base in the U.K. and had one big U.S. customer in SunGard. They sold the company for what looks like $4-5 million to English service bureau and forms processing sysems specialist DRS. DRS, to me, seems like an English version of Scantron.

DRS paid a good healthy price(about 2 1/2 times revenue). I also think Peladon has some good software. This is more evidence of the health of the capture space and the valuation that some of the advanced technologies have. RG

Visioneer awards

Just returned from Visioneer's inaugural partners conference at the Vinoy in St. Pete's. Excellent first-time event. Saw a lot of new faces in the VAR channel there, which has to be expected, based on the phenominal growth we've been seeing in the workgroup scanner market. Susan Moyse was on hand, and she told the crowd that more than 260,000 workgroup scanners moved in 2005, the fourth straight year of 80% segment growth or more. She has projected that more than 900,000 workgroup scanners will be sold by 2009, which is starting to approach the number of segment 2-5 copiers sold per year - the ones that compete with document scanners. I guess I'm saying sombody has to be selling all these scanners - and a lot are being sold by new blood in the imaging industry. As a relatively new player in this space, Visioneer seems to be attracting some of that new blood - as well as some of the old standbys.

Here's a link to some of the announcements that came out of the conference.

Capture news

Interwoven has signed on as a reseller for Kofax. They previously had a strong relationship, but this would seem to make it stronger. No, I don't think this is just a step before Interwoven buys Kofax.

Datacap partner Applied Docs formally introduces a solution aimed at reducing the time it takes for trucks to clear customs at the U.S.-Canadian border. DIR featured this story a couple months back.

Latest

Traveling this week at Visioneer's first-ever partner conference in St. Petersburg. Good turnout of ISVs, resellers, and press/analysts. I believe just over 100 attendees are scheduled to be here. I'm supposed to give a keynote in a couple hours - talking on the growth of distributed scanning and capture in the SMB space - two areas driving the rapid growth of the workgroup segment where Visioneer now competes.

On the other end of the spectrum, of course, is Scan-Optics, which recently announced a couple of SO Series machines going into Time Customer Service. We realize Scan-Optics is going through some transitions, but we were worried that we hadn't heard enough success stories from them lately. So this is good news.

RG

Records management

This is a pretty cool idea. Automated designation of records by FileNet's Records Crawler technology. Need to find some more info. on this. Speaking of RM, AIIM has announced an ERM certification program. They are running it themselves and offering four levels of certification through a combination of online and in person instruction. More on this in our next issue - due out next week.

Salesforce.com marketplace

Is anyone in our industry doing integration with Salesforce.com? This seems like an opportunity.

The case for e-mal management

Yet another amusing example of e-mail mismanagement.

Nuance JPEG

It appears Nuance, formerly known as ScanSoft, has become the latest JPEG compression user to come to a settlement with Forgent. Interesting because Nuance has some patents of its own around one-touch document scanning technology that they recently began exploring. Plus, how much JPEG does Nuance use? Maybe they use some algorithms in their PDF technology.

ACS "No Deal"

As you probably saw, the ACS deal didn't go through. Not sure what this means to the outsourcing industry as a whole, aside from the fact that ACS will continue to be a formidable competitor - just like they always have been - to image-based data entry shops in North America and worldwide.

TiS Lands $2 million deal; ACS acquisition in jeopardy

Here's a great example of the expansion of document imaging within organizations that we are starting to see more of. The Australian DoD has signed a $2 million agreement with Top Image Systems to expand their eFlow application from just invoices, to all sorts of other documents.

Eight billion dollar ACS deal could be falling apart.

EMC introduces Google desktop search into its Enterprise Content Integration Services.

Zoran announces software to enable MFPs to print XPS files. XPS is the PDF alternative that Microsoft is introducing along with its Vista operating system and next version of Office, which are due out next year. Of course, just to keep things interesting, Microsoft is also supporting PDF.

Latest news

OPEX has released a new version of its AS3600 document scanner. The original 3600 is featured in this week's DIR, where we discuss some of the success the company has been having. The original 3600 was first introduced at TAWPI 2003.

Also, kudos to Hyland for reaping some awards in the healthcare IT market. Hyland is also featured in this week's DIR. Over the past four years, Hyland's software has been installed at more than 400 healthcare providers.

ACS to be sold?

Here's something that's pretty interesting. Lason has already been acquired. I guess SourceCorp would be next.

TIS Subsidiary Gaining Momentum

It looks like Top Image Systems 2004 acquisition of Japanese reseller Toyo, Inc, is starting to pay off. TIS Corporate recently reported that TIS Japan would account for 20% of the company's revenue in 2005. Through the first three quarters of 2005, TIS had reported 63% growth over 2004, and a conservative estimate would place its 2005 corporate revenue at $16 million. This means TIS Japan accounted for a little over $3 million with TIS counting on it to grow to more than $5 million in 2006.

Layoffs at EMC

This doesn't sound good for Captiva employees. I will say that I thought Captiva handled the Documentum acquisition pretty well and didn't cut too much there. This article also seems to indicate that the company wants to continue to put more focus on software- and after paying $275 million for Captiva, you wouldn't expect them to gut it too bad.

RG

Former Apprentice Contestent Touts Book Scanner

I find Donald Trump's The Apprentice to be highly entertaining television. Maybe it's just the way "the Donald" carries himself. He's kind of like the Deion Sanders of the business world. Yeah, he's a showboat, but he appears to have the credentials to back it up.

Anyways, if you follow DIR, you know I have a place in my heart for book scanning and this company called Atix just launched itself and is promoting a $35,000 book scanner. The CEO is Nick Warnock, former Xerox copier salesman and Apprentice contestent. He's currently at the CES show in Vegas - where Google's top brass was supposed to make some big announcement today. Obviously ATIZ is targeting Google as a potential customer.

RG

DM Compliance

This article discusses a couple of proposed changes in the Federal trial system that are direclty related to document management systems. Doesn't seem like too big a deal on the surface, but this attorney wants to compare it to Chernobyl. Maybe I need to talk to some of my lawyer friends. The article mainly focuses on e-mail, but the amendments would seem to include all sorts of records related to federal court cases.

-- Thanks to Harvey Spencer for sending us the link.

Holiday press releases

Hope everyone's holiday's went well. In an effort to expediate press release posting, I'm going to try linking to some of them from my blog - as it alleviates posting problems that I encounter when trying to copy and past differently formatted documents.

Here's one about a Canon/Captaris partnership that is pretty interesting. one the questions that has arisen is what does this mean for eCopy, which is also a Captaris and Canon partner. Is Canon looking for a way to bypass eCopy?

Here's one about Westbrook Technologies signign up two new reseller partners. Nothing to huge, but we are wondering how Westrbook's SOA initiatives are going to affect their channel.

Here's a very comprehensive story from our friends at IBML about an large installation with a U.K. service bureau. Interesting thing here is that the whole thing is being done in color.

Thanks to the folks at Hyland and reseller IMR for helping to keep my state's spending in check.

Top Image Systems nails another transporation deal.

Oce ODT is doing some cool stuff with OCR/ICR technology to aid in redaction procedures.

Xmas thought

Holiday Musings
For the past couple years Captiva has sent out this animated Christmas card depicting Reynolds Claus alleviating the sufferings of poor Bob Cratchit by delivering forms processing software to help him catch up on his paperwork and make it home in time for Xmas. We are eagerly awaiting this year’s rendition. Based on the timing of the EMC acquisition, is there a chance it will feature Tucci-Claus delivering a bag of $ 275 million in cash to Reynolds and all the other shareholders that have apparently been good this year?

Captiva EMC Proxy

Here's an interesting link to Captiva's proxy discussing EMC's intent to aquire Captiva. It seems Captiva had been actively looking to sell the company since early 2004, but at that time could only get a $14 per share offer.

Open Source

Aside from Web services - the other big IT buzzword floating around the document imaging industry seems to be Open Source. Here's a great article on the Open Source - Open Office movement.

So, what does all this mean. Potentially it means the death of the desktop OS as we know it. Imagine an Open Sourced browser connected to open source applicaitons through a Web services environment...

RG

Web services

So, I've had quite a few conversations lately about Web serivces and what they are going to mean to the document imaging industry. Web services seem to be the next generation of this whole ASP thing that started a few years back. I think ASP - as it was defined then, may have been a miserable failure, but as that market has reinvented itself as SOA - it seems to be gaining some success. This article discussed the tremndous success Salesforce.com has made at the expense of traditional software developer Siebel. (plus, you have to sensationalistic headlines stolen from psychadelic rock songs.)

The major difference between ASP and SOA seems to be that because SOA is bases on standards, the rented software can be more easily deployed. And if you go down to Rent-Way to pick up a stereo, you don't want to have to hire a technician to hook it up. It also enables people to rent best-of-breed components and piece together their own applications. Here's a great white paper written by industry consultant Bud Porter-Roth that is easy to read, but gives some pretty comprehensive background on SOA.

We'd probably be remiss is we didn't mention that Porter-Roth was contracted by Westbrook Technologies, which has been working on a brand new applicaiton for the past year and half - totally based on SOA. CEO Paul Lord probably sees the opportunity for someone like Westbrook to emerge as the Salesforce.com of the ECM industry. In fact, Digitech's HK Bain made this comparison when discussing the potential of this company's hosted document repository model.

Is Web services another case of smoke and mirrors, like ASP turned out to be. It doesn't seem to be as there seems to be a lot more support around them - mainly becuase of the standards being developed by groups like OASIS. Check it out for yourselves. SOA may be a bit technology daunting at first, but it's ulitimate goal is to make software easier to use and deploy - which should make software deployments less technically daunting and increase the market size.

RG

Microsoft Desktop Search

Here's an interesting article discussing Microsoft's plans to enter the enterprise desktop search market. It seems Micrsofot is really embracing this whole ECM concept. There is not mention of OCR and document images in this article, but I'm sure that is addressed - if even through the Office OCR/ScanSoft stuff. Basically, this is a direct response to Google's desktop serach success, which Dean Tang of ABBYY has called the "killer app for OCR." However, while Google charges for enteprise search, Microsoft is offering it for free. How weill it will work and how practical it is remain to be seen. Also, while this may be a direct attack on Google, the soon-to-be merged Vertiy/Autonomy entity may get caught in the crossfire!

Microsoft Web services

This is a "memo" that was reportedly leaked from Micrsoft to the press. Of course, it reads more like a press release. Do you have any thoughts on this. Like, what exactly is Microsoft doing in terms of Web services. I found this memo and its direction very unclear and full of buzzwords.

On another point, Microsoft seems to be announcing recent partnerships with an inordinate number of ECM companies. Is all that related to the info in this memo? Don't know but I've seen stuff from Open Text, Interwoven, and some others lately talking about how they are getting closer to Microsoft. A lot of this seems based on SharePoint 12, which actually seems like a pretty decent ECM-lite system in its own right. So, what is Microsoft going to do for all these partners?
Please post, I'm looking for some insights. If you happen to have experience with Eastman Software, feel free to post as well, as some historical Microsoft ECM perspective would be helpful as well.

Thanks.

RG

FileNET Thunderhead

Here's a neat partnership for handling exceptions in the BPM process.

Vingette hires McKesson Exec

It seems ECM players can't enough of the healthcare market these days...

Database Wars

In case you're tracking these things for ECM purposes - and if you following the ECM market, you probably should be, here's a story on Microsoft's upcoming new version of SQL, along with some commentary on database market share.

Digital Paper

Some more good stuff on one of our favorite technologies. I saw some of this digital paper in its early states at Xerox in Rochester a couple years ago. This is the medium for digital books that I want.

RG

Konica Minolta

This kind of sounds similar to what is happening at Kodak... Konica Minolta seens to be doing fairly well everywhere but being sunk by its film business.

Automy Verity

Apparently, Autonomy is buying Verity

Tucci in Forbes

From Joe Tucci's recent interview on Forbes.comPosted in the "Infoimaging" section no less. Perhaps Document Imaging Report is too narrow of a name. Seriously, does InfoImaging Report turn you on? I kind of like it.
Hmmm.

Anyways, here's Tucci's quote on Captiva from the Forbes story. (preceded by the question.)

FDC: Speaking of which, why did you decide to pay $375 million for Captiva?

JT: Captiva is clearly a big worldwide leader in image and image-capture management. In round numbers, Captiva brings in about $100 million in revenue. But still no company has a 20% share of this market. It's very fragmented. So we're adding beef to our market share. We'll capture the images, and then we'll make sure all these images are properly archived. This is critical to us.

First off we love the way the question says $375 million. I mean what's an extra $100 million (we assume this was a typo, as the announced price of the deal was $275 million) when you are talking to EMC. Heck, three years ago, they could have bought InputAccel for like $10 million probably, but they really didn't seem to bat an eyelash when we asked about that. These guys netted over $300 million in income last quarter.

We also like the 20% market share part. Where's that coming from? Did they pick it up from DIR, from Harvey Spencer Assocaites perhaps? Just cuious as to what Mr. Tucci is reading these days.

RG

ECM Mergers

So, we've all heard the FileNET/Oracle rumor. Reason I don't like it was because FileNET just announced some sort of integration to SharePoint. How about Oracle/EMC? Now, that's something that might make sense. It would definitely set up well as an IBM competitor and then that would leave only Microsoft to gets its ECM act together and we'd have our three major database competitors all moved over into the ECM space.

Thoughts?

RG

More on Yahoo! book scanning

Here's an interesting report on the Internet Archive-hosted book scanning party held this week in San Francisco. Apparently, Microsoft has gotten involved -- anything to counteract Google. Also, if you just want to cut to the chase, here's an excerpt into how the book scanning is apparently being handled,

"While Google has released few details of its scanning project (the search company has nondisclosure agreements with its library partners), the Internet Archive had a display of its technology at the Tuesday night event.

The Internet Archive built a specialized scanning machine and written open-source software called Scribe for the specific purpose of digitizing books. The "machine" is an assembly of a standard PC with the Scribe software installed, two Cannon EOS cameras, a pedal-operated glass and metal stand to hold and secure books at an angle, along with a table and chair. The machine looks much like a photo or voting booth, with black cloth covering a box frame and shielding the books and computer gear from ambient light.

The chair seats one person, who operates the computer program and turns book pages by hand. During the scanning process, the book sits at a 90-degree angle under glass, which protects it from the camera light and causes the least amount of damage to its pages, according to the Internet Archive. The operator pushes a pedal under the table to release the book from under the glass, and turns the page before it's ready to take another picture.

Once a picture is taken, both pages of the book appear on a computer screen in their original form. The Scribe software then finds the center of the page and makes adjustments of the picture's angle or ensures that it's cropped properly. It will also clean up any poor coloring and make it uniform.

The operator enters some metadata about the book--its author, title and publication date. And once the book is scanned, it's then saved to the system and catalogued. Scribe takes the metadata from the book and matches it with data from existing card catalogs in order to prevent duplication. The work is then added to the digital record.

It takes roughly one hour to scan two 300-page books. And it costs an estimated 10 cents a page, split among data storage, labor and equipment and administration fees, according to Brewster Kahle, the project's leader. The cost does not take into account libraries' fees for getting the book to the scanners.

Daniel Greenstein of the University of California's archive project said that his group has donated $500,000 to assess the ultimate costs of scanning from the libraries' perspective.

The Internet Archive currently has 10 scanning machines, but it is ramping up to build 10 more in the next year."

I guess our quesiton is, with all the cool book scanning technology out there that we saw at AIIM, why? I guess we'll need to call Brewster Kahle to find out.

RG

New Yorker project

If you're interested in magazine scanning, you might want to give this a listen. It's an NPR interview (5 minutes) with the project leader for the New Yorker's DjVu 8 DVD set.

RG

Other imaging stocks

Oh yeah,related to the EMC deal, I love this post on Captiva's Yahoo! message board. This sector is heating up. I just talked to a financial analyst who was all bummed because now that Captiva is off the market he needs to find someone else to cover. The problem with ScanSoft, of course, which is now known as Nuance, is that the majority of its revenue is from voice recognition. So, unless that poster is talking about the company spinning and selling off it's imaging business... to raise money for the speech business, guess it could happen, but wouldn't cause a huge jump in stock I don't think.

Anyhow, also got a couple odd press releases - maybe just the timing one was. One is that eCopy will be showing at Documentum's Momentum event. Remember that article I wrote about the ideal capture company commanding both ad hoc and batch product lines - could EMC buy eCopy.

Also, Datacap just announced it was integrating with the latest version of AIX - the old OTG document imaging application. Announced it today of all days. What's up?

Finally, looks like imaging-related stocks like FileNET,Dicom, Plasmon, and even Stellent and Xerox a little are up today. ACS is way up too but for different reasons.

Reynolds role at EMC

Of course the big news in the industry is that EMC has announced its intention to acquire Captiva for $275 million cash. Internestingly, a day following that announcement, Joe Tucci, EMC's president and CEO was appointed Chairman of EMC's board. I had understood that under SOX, the sort of single-person triumvirate was frowned upon. Not that EMC has traditionally cared what anybody has thought...

But here's the thing - even though Reynolds got cash and would seem to have every reason to step out - wouldn't he be the perfect guy to help turn EMC around. Look what he did at Captiva. We're talking less than a dollar per share just a few years ago - now he sells it for 22.25 per share. Great work. Reynolds made Captiva into a money making machine. Could he do the same thing at EMC? It's obviously a much larger business... Anyway, I'm all in favor of it - after all, we did award him our DIR Man of the Year back at AIIM.

Carry on,

RG

Kodak Digital Assets

This is an interesting story on the state of things at Eastman Kodak. It discussed the struggles the company has had in making its transition to digital. Of course, the document imaging part of the business, which we cover, was years ahead of the rest of the company in going digital with its scanners, but still has struggled to wean itself of microfilm revenue. And there has been some disastrous software activity as well.

Anyhow, the most intersting part of this story appears at the end when they discuss the four distinct reporting units for Kodak starting next year. That will give us a clear picture of who is making money and who is not at Kodak - setting the table for potential spin-offs and acquistions. Kodak has assembled quite an interesting portfolio of printing businesses to surround its document scanning technology. It will be great to see how the business model pans out. It's my guess that it will be the most successful of Kodak's four business units. Then, what do you do with it?

Stay tuned.

Microsoft PDF

It seems like after all the huffing and puffing about Metro, aka .XPS, Microsoft has come out in support of PDF. Speculation that we've seen is that the move is beibng driven by the State of Massachusetts reent announcement to go to non-proprietary document formats in all its state offices by the year 2007. According to eWeek. "As part of this new policy, the state will support the newly ratified Open Document Format for Office Applications, or OpenDocument, and PDFs (portable document format) as the standards for its office documents." That would seem like a bit of rash and quick decision to us - but perhaps Microsoft is scared getting dumped by other state offices in favor of Open Source and PDF.

One thing is for sure, we were a bit surprised when Microsoft announced Metro because we thought they would just leverage ScanSoft's rapidly improving PDF tools to create PDF in Office and really put some crunch on Acrobat. Don't know if they've leveraged ScanSoft, but they've definitely put PDF creation in Office.

RG

New Yorker Archives

Here's a link to the New Yorker back issue demo site. Maybe the best use of DjVu technology we've seen so far.


RG

World of PDF

Two interesting posts on our Web site over the past two days regarding what has been heretofore known as the World of PDF. First, the PDF/A standard was finalized by ISO.Second, as foreshadowed in a recent edition of DIR, ScanSoft has announced support of XPS - Microsoft's alternative for PDF. From what we understand there are currently about 1,000 developers that have software that can create PDF - Microsoft, of course being the notable exception. We wonder how long it will take XPS to reach that same level - if it ever does?

Also, as far as imaging goes, we've had quite a bit of dicussion recently on highly compressed PDF documents - employing segmentation and JBIG-2 technologies. We're not even sure XPS supports JBIG2 - but nonetheless, it is a Microsoft driven stnadard.


Cheers.

RG

HSA Capture Follow-up

Just returning from Harvey Spencer's capture conference held up in Glen Cove on Long Island. Had a really nice time. There were about 40 attendees - with the likes of Adobe, Kodak, Fujitsu, Ricoh, AnyDoc, Datacap, Captaris, Cranel, PDI (the people that bought VisionShape), ISIS Papyrus, ABBYY, A2iA, IBM, Kofax, Captiva and a few others all attending. The conference covered several topics, including Java programming, check image quality (with a great presention from Frank Jaffe. Probably the most interesting session to me, perhaps because I was moderating it, was a racous panel discussion on when to use a digital copier for scanning and when to use a dedcated scanner. It seems most people in the traditional imaging industry still look down on the abilities of digital copier dealers to effectively sell document imaging technology - not to mention the capabilities of the hardware itself. Well, there were certainly a lot of opinions in the room. About the best conclusion I came to is that digital copiers seem to be posiioned for ad hoc scanning of a few pages at a time and no more - but with the trend toward distributed capture vs. centralized - this ad hoc stuff is making up a growing percentage of the market.

Speaking of ad hoc, Oracle had some fairly interesting collaboration and records management stuff they just came out with. They are positioned it as "content mangement for the masses" and have some starting price at like $60 per seat. Going after SharePoint it appears. And then Adobe's John Hoye was there marketing the companies' scanning toolkit for PDF creation. Just thought those are a couple more signs that this ad hoc market is going to start growing - and may and maybe already is taking business away from traditional imaging vendors. I'll leave it at that as I think I am starting to have a flashback to some of the shouting I heard at yesterday's panel.

Hurricane Can't stop ReadSoft

ReadSoft's U.S. headquarters are in Metairie, Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans, but it turns out the company seems to have a better hurricane plan in place than the government, as it has continued operaitons without missing a beat, accoridng to Bob Fresneda, president of the Swedish forms processing vendors' U.S. operations. Fresneda, who was behind the transition of the company's North American headquarters from San Diego to Metairie a few years back, said the company set up a specific plan for evacuation in case of a hurricane like the one that hit last week. That has included relocating several of its 25 U.S. employees to its Chicago office. ReadSoft also moved it's e-mail server software to Sweden and has maintained its 800 support line without much a break. Fresneda said that all of ReadSoft employees are safe and that the damage to the Meatrie area was not nearly as bad as some of the other stuff in the area.

"From a personal standpoint, this has been a large distraction to say the least," Fresneda told DIR. "But from a business standpoint, thankfully we had a good backup and insurance plan that has allowed us to keep running smoothly. Our U.S. operations have grown 60% in the first half of the year, and our pipeline for the rest of the year looks good."

This week's issue features a story on ReadSoft and the success it's had in the ERP image-enablement market.

HP Kodak

This is an interesting analysis of the rumored HP/Kodak acquisition/merger. It pretty much dismisses it for a variety of reasons-incluidng the fact that Kodak's legacy film business is pretty much akin to Compaq's PC business- and of course, we all know how well that turned out for HP. (On a side note, has there ever been an investigation into that merger? In many ways it reminds me of the current disaster situation in New Orleans. Every seemed to see what was coming - but didn't do anything about it. In fact, in HP's situation, Walter Hewlett I believe seemed to call the whole thing on the nose - but was ignored. Why? If you have an explantion please post!)

Anyhow, the interesting thing about the HP/Kodak story is the discussion - although it is not named as such, of HP's Graphics Communications business, of which is Document Imaging business is now a part. It really just throws some more kudos on that part of the company. If you remember, Kodak Document Imaging really helped lead Kodak's charge - albeit when something as large as Kodak moves, it's not always at light brigade speed - into the digital age.

What would be kind of neat would be taking Kodak's Graphics Communications business and pairing it with HP's imaging stuff. In fact, here's a fairly intriguing archiving and imaigng announcement out of HP today. HP/Kodak would truly make a digital imaging powerhouse - of course, dealing with the dead weight between the two companies may make the merger impossible.

Cheers.

Traveling to Harvey's Capture Conference in Long Island this week. Will try and post from there.

RG

Corporate Weblogs

There is a comapany out there called Traction Software that has added WebDAV controls to its corporate blogging tools and it marketing them as "ECM lite" or an ECM solution for the mid-market company. The company was founded by some SGML experts and the software - which I received a demo of, is pretty neat. Kind of a next-generation collaboration tool, dare I say. It's also of course got all the linking capabilities so popular in Blogs. Depsite Traction's efforts, however, this article proposes that Blogs are still bascially entertainment vehicles. This may hold true for now, but if you look at the history of search, that also started as primarily an entertainment thing. The great thing about consumer-driven technology that gets adopted commerically, is there is very little training needed to ramp up use.

Cheers.

RG

SOX Ramifications

This guy might be a nutjob, but he is one of my favorite columnists. Check out what he has to say about the potential impact of SOX and other content management-based regulations. If any shard of this turns about to be true -- and Cringely did (in a very unpopular move) accurately predict the limited effect of Y2K on the nation's IT infrastructure -- it could further turn the ECM industry on it's ear. Under this scenario, ECM/records management suddenly becomes a company-saving application, and the stakes suddenly get a lot higher.

What do you think?

RG

BroadVision acquired

How nuts were people during the Web boom? Well, I found a Wired Magazine article from June 2000 that listed BroadVision with a market cap of $6.7 billion. And I'm not even sure that was the height of the Web boom. You probably saw the company was recently sold for $45 million. What happened?

"Like a Rocket"

This article is kind of fun to read. It's from the Spet. 17, 1997 issue of DIR, about six months before I took it over. I looked it up after I heard that Captiva was closing its Waltham, MA, offices - which represented the headquarters of recognition specialist Symbus. I believe this was Reynolds' Bish first forms processing-related M&A activity.

This article discusses the FormWare/Symbus merger. Recognition industry guru Arthur Gingrande actually co-founded Symbus but doesn't receive any credit in this particular piece. We do get great stuff however, like Jim Woodruff of Wheb Systems estimating the potential of the forms processing market to be $5 billion. And Reynolds with the great "The market is going to take off like a rocket." There's also something in here from Dan Elam about saying everyone is going to sell out or go public in two years.

Anyhow, it's some pretty fun reading - just please nobody go pulling out any of my old columns...

Cheers.

RG
FROM DIR - Spect. 17, 1997

CONSOLIDA TION BOOSTS FORM PROCESSING GROWTH Recent Deals Only A Start, Analysts Predict

The desire to pool resources and wrest greater market share has led to a spate of mergers and acquisitions in the document capture market. The business dealings of the past month such as the one that created FormWare Corp. through the merger of Park City, Utah-based TextWare Corp. and Symbus Technology Inc. of Waltham, Mass. - are only a start.
"We're on the threshold of the industry starting to congeal," says Herb Schantz, president of Sterling, Va.-based HLS Consulting. "Good little guys are going to bond together to form good big guys."
Analysts and vendors believe there is huge market potential for software that collects data from scanned forms and delivers it to another application.
Creating user-friendly applications is the key, vendors say. Consolidation will give smaller vendors the financial muscle to develop easy-to-use products. "Virtually all the independent market either have plans to be bought or go public within 24 months," says Dan Richmond, Va.-based analyst with IMERGE Consulting."

Small Players, Big Market
Jim Woodruff, vice president of marketing at Wheb Systems, estimates the potential market for forms processing software is $10 billion, even though systems being sold today equal about 5 percent of that - or $500 million.
Such predictions cause TextWare President Reynolds Bish to declare, "The market is about to take off like a rocket."
But Schantz advises the market won't grow without continued consolidation. Merging allows companies to assign engineers to more diverse projects, which results in greater product offerings and the ability to purse more vertical markets.
Look for continued consolidation among companies selling products such as scanners, optical character recognition engines, preprocessing or postprocessing software. Even small system integrators will be active, Schantz says.
For instance, in addition to the TextWare/Symbus merger, the Sterling, Va.-based Star Technologies last month bought the assets and products of the Potomac, Md.-based postprocessing software developer Intrafed (DIR, August 6, p. 8). Last week, Xionics Document Technologies [XION] of Burlington, Mass., bought Seaport Imaging of San Jose, Calif.
"It is a huge market with dozens of players competing in regional markets, Schantz says. "If nothing is happening in a region in a year, [the regional companies] almost dry up."

Matching Strengths
"The combined company has greater resources - people, products and capital - to better execute its business plan and respond to the needs of the marketplace," Bish says. "Historically, forms processing is a lot of little companies and no one has been able to get large enough to get 'critical mass.'"
For example, by expanding its number of executives, a company's officers can focus on areas of expertise. Similarly, the company has doubled its software development arm.
"At TextWare we always focused on providing usable applications as opposed to providing tool kits or technology that requires integration services. Symbus focused on technology," Bish says. "Their technology with our usability focus - you end up with powerful and competitive products in the marketplace."

Of the TextWare/Symbus teaming, Elam notes, "Textware has only recently emerged as a strong enough player to challenge for significant market share, so Symbus will help bolster them ... for more complex systems."
"In a year or so, [TextWare] is probably the only company that has a
realistic chance of going public and doing well," he adds.
The heads of the small companies also are anxious to see a return on their
years of effort, Elam says.
With the exception of a few larger vendors that sell shrink-wrapped, prepackaged systems, most companies bring in less than $10 million a year in revenues, he says.
"Most of these are entrepreneurial companies with guys ready to get their money out," Elam says. Also, larger companies can draw more attention to a brand name - which in turn can give vendors more leverage with system integrators, he says.

Simple Solutions
To grow, companies must focus on creating systems that are easy to install and use.
There are few differences in the performance of recognition
technologies, Bish says. The competitive advantage now lies in added value a firm packages with the recognition technology.
"Forms processing still requires a great deal of customization on an installationto-installation basis," Bish says.
"Over time, we need to not only make the technology more affordable, but focus on making it easier to use, reducing the need for customization. [The market] is not to that point yet."

Focusing On Benefits
Woodruff suggests growing the forms processing market is largely a matter
of promoting the practical benefits of the technology.
"The imaging market is way too technology-centric," he says. Vendors need to go from talking about how many characters a minute their products handle to describing how much money customers can save by using the software. "I expect packaged products to prevail over component approaches," he adds.
A consolidation trend would be good for the forms processing market, Woodruff says. Although he considers San Diego-based Wheb Systems a large business, he agrees many of the players are small. While, bigger companies would attract big clients, a Citibank-sized company would have a hard time doing business with a small, regional operation, he says. Major players will focus on different types of users by creating industry-specific products for markets.
(Reynolds Bish, TextWare, 801/645-9600, http://www.textware.com; Dan Elam, IMERGE Consulting, 804/342-7400; Mary Beth Poggi, Unterberg Harris, 212/5728078; Herb Schantz, HLS Consulting, 703/444-7037; Jim Woodruff, Wheb Systems, 619/586-7885, http://whebsys.com.) 8






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Enterprise Input Management

Captiva’s Digital Mailroom application was probably the first example of the company’s future direction. At the company’s recent Capture ’05 conference, the maturing and growing input management vendor further detailed its efforts at becoming an enterprise aplication players. More on this in our next issue, which should be out early next week.

For subscription info, please contact me at ralphg@documentimagingreport.com

Thx,
RG

SourceCorp

Hope your Independance day celebrations went well. Just saw this piece of news regarding SourceCorp. A bit disturbing as SourceCorp is one of the few pure-imaging service bureau roll-ups from the late 1990s that has had some success. Granted, there have been a few bumps, but nothing like those encountered by competitors ImageMax and Lason. And right now a lot of people are trying to get into the business that SourceCorp is in. Of course, this might mean that somebody big wants to buy them, which may be the reason why all this posturing is going on. Anyways, here's hoping they can pull through this without too much of a mess.

Cheers.

RG

Importance of text-based documents

I’m reading this book called Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, which provides a detailed explanation on why peoples of Euroasian descent came to dominate the earth and wipe out most of the people indigenous to other lands. A lot of it has to do with more advanced technology.

I got to thinking about this evolution in terms of my own newsletter and skill set and whether or not video communication will kill out text-based communication. I guess, since text is the reason most paper document exists, this conundrum could possibly be applied to the entire document imaging industry at large.

One of the reasons, I always give to people for paper sticking around as long as it has, is inertia. And I guess text-based communication has built up quite a bit of inertia in its thousands of years of use. Diamond points out that literacy has historically been very important to dominant societies. The ability to communicate experiences and provide written analysis is important for repeating successful processes, as well as learning about your enemies. (Which I hope you all consider when it comes time to re-up your subs to DIR.)

Theoretically, video can also be used for this type of important communication and is in some corners. However, it seems to me, in its early incarnations at least, video has been mainly hijacked for entertainment purposes. I still don’t see a lot of thought going into how to make video a more valuable means of important communication—although I guess the 8 million cable channels available today, and even more when Internet video technology ramps up—create some potential. But it still seems the majority of all that broadcasting will focus on entertainment.

And that is why text-based communication continues to live on and is very relevant. It is the basis of most serious communication. And related to this, Google should be applauded for its efforts to put all the text-based information buried in books online, because the majority of World Wide Web content is also developed for entertainment purposes.

Anyways, those are my thoughts for today. As always, feel more than free to comment.

Cheers.

RG

Fujitsu fingerprint ID for scanner access

The possiblity for this type of thing are endless. It's a device Fujitsu has introduced for fingerprint ID to control document scanner access. If a user only scanned a certain type of document, it could potentially be set up to give a whole new meaning to the term "one touch scanning."

Here's the official European press release. Wonder why this hasn't been marketed over hear yet?
RG

More AIIM show

Here's Mike Hurley's (of GreenSquare Consulting) take on the AIIM show. Mike makes some very perceptive comments. My favorite possibly being - "Workflow and BPM continue to defy a coherent trade show demo." A concept I've been arguing for years. EMC in general, in fact, is very hard to demo at a trade show.

As I said previously, on Tuesday, when traffic on the AIIM side seemed dead, the On Demand side looked fairly lively. Both sides, I thought looked good on Wed. But I got to thinking, why was the On Demand side bigger? Big iron, of course. It's a lot more fun to watch something print, scan, and copyu documents at 200 dpi, than it is to here Open Text discuss the advantages of collaboration and records management. I mean, what was the most popular exhibit on the AIIM side? It might have been the 4Digital Books thing that scanned books at an incredible rate using some sort of vacuum page-turning mechanism.

Hyland might have the right idea, by setting up a carnival atmosphere. The fact is trade shows have not adapted well to the Internet age. Somehow we need to merge virtual stuff with these trade shows to get them out of the 1970s mode they are stuck in. I'm not sure how to do it, but we have a lot of bright software people in the industry, can somebody think of someway to make this show more relevant by incoporating technology into the show's presentation?

Let me know. Or let Kerry Gumas of Questex know. Please.

RG

JSR 170, Linux drivers, and Captiva

I guess you probably saw that the content repository standard JSR 170 passed.We're not exactly sure what this means and how it will be utilized in the real world, but it seems like a great concept. This is the kind of stuff the Workflow Management Coalition, I believe has been trying to do for years, except this adds search and retrieval capablities. And it's all a java-based standard, which could I guess lead us down some interesting Web servies-paved paths.

A random thought that came up in conversation last week and maybe remotely related to JSR 170. But, is anyone familiar with Linux-based document scanner drivers?

Finally, you may have seen the Captiva landed another InputAccel for Invoices deal, this one with Novartis UK - a big drug company. We find the fact the deal was in the U.K. as particularly significant, because that means the company was likely facing competition from BancTec and ReadSoft. As we've said before, Captiva, which entered the invoices game late, is really making some noise now. Also, interesting to note that Daniel Vaniche, who help a high position at SWT - is the spokesperson in the press release. That happened pretty fast. It's also worth noting that Captiva's stock is over $14 per share as I write this. Good work guys.

Cheers.

RG

AIIM On Demand follow-up

So, now that the does has settled, and we've done the majority of our AIIM follow-ups, the question is what did you all think of the show?

Please post on this, as I've heard mixed reactions and definitely have my own viewpoints, which I will share:

I thought from a gross attendance standpoint, it was awful. That is every day except for Wednesday. Wednesday, the floor really appeared to be hopping, like it was for most of two days last year. So, what was the problem? I don't know. Could have been the Monday hotel jam up due to Penn's graduation, slowed down the first day of the show. The last day always stinks, so we'll just discount that. Kerry Gumans, of Questex swore up and down (well, not literally, he just insisted very politely - as he's really a nice guy, so we're rooting for the show to succeed), that in the end, hotels were not an issue and that in the end everyone was accomodated, but just my visuials would seem to indicate differently. I wish I could say next year, we'd have a chance to validate this theory, but the fact is, Penn's graducation is once again schduled for the Monday before the show, Monday, May 15. Well, at least this year, everyone, including Questex, will know what they're getting into ahead of time. Hopefully, this knowledge will help push up Tuesday's attendance.

Then, of course, there is the whole issue of regional traffic. I think New York defintely offers better regional traffic. The question revolves around how valuable that regional traffic is. Does a location like New York present more tire kickers, which are a waste of vendors time? It's my thought that tire kickers eventually turn into buyers, so all traffic is good. But I did receive feedback from some vendors that because Philadelphia was more of a distination site for many of the attendees, that the quality of attendees was up despite the overall drop in numbers. The increase in conference attendees would seem to reinforce this.

And when you take out the tire kickers and factor in that Philly is less expensive in most regards than New York, even cheaper beer, than is it a better payback on your trade show investment?

More on my thoughts on a future format for the AIIM show in particular later.

Out. - RG

e-mail management and Morgan Stanley

John Mancini gave an interesting keynote speech at the recent AIIM On Demand Expo. His talk was entitled the State of the ECM Industry and covered a broad range of topics including the state of ECM adoption in various parts of the world. One of the topics he addressed was e-mail management, which we at DIR have made known is one of our favorite topics. We are very much against the save everything policy and think users must have some sort of selective policy or severly curtail their use of e-mail. As digital phone conversations replace analog ones, however, safe havens for private conversations are becoming few and far between. Anyhow, here a link to an article that pretty much says the "save everything" technique is going to be prevelent in all public companies.

AIIM Awards

Heard a funny story from former Imaging Magazine Editor Mark Young at the AIIM show this week in Phildelphia. The esteemed Mr. Young, who is now with a group called Buyers Lab, was sipping on an ice water outside the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton where Canon was holding its annual press reception. The reception is always a gala affair, (to borrow the tone of Vanity Fair diarist Dominick Dunne, and the atmosphere brought to mind tales I had heard about the Imaging Magazine parties of years gone by. Unfortunately, at the time the last of these were taking place, I was a cub reporter cutting my teeth with Imaging rival Business Solutions (then Business Systems) and not on the invite list.

The official reason for these parties were Imaging Magazine “Product of the Year or Best of AIIM” or whatever they were called awards, which Young indicated were only half-serious. “One year, we named a pen the best analog input device,” Young recalled. The real reason for the parties and the awards was to service Imaging Magazine’s customers, aka. its advertisers. Eventually, under the guidance of Doug Henschen and Miller-Freeman and eventually CMP, the Best of AIIM awards took on a more serious tone – but we’re not sure if that was so good for the industry or for Imaging, for that matter…

So, without further adieu (and about an hour of time to kill as I sit on a runway in Philadelphia) in the spirit of the old Imaging Magazine Product of the Year awards—in other words don’t take these too seriously—here are the first even DIR AIIM Awards. I only wish I had a drink to offer you before you read on:

1. Man of the Year: This one goes to Captiva President and CEO Reynolds Bish because he be da’ man. After completing the acquisition of SWT this month, he will be on target for more than $100 million in profitable revenue next year. Bish even boasted he plans to surpass more than $200 million in revenue in three years. You go Reynolds! As I sat with him at AIIM, we recalled AIIM 2002 in S.F., just three years earlier when his company merged with InputAccel (aka ActionPoint) in what looked like a marriage of floundering companies. Who knew all Reynolds needed was a little cash in the bank and a listing on the Nasdaq to become a true ECM heavyweight? During the first six months following the merger, we saw Captiva’s stock drop all the way below a dollar a share. How many companies have ever recovered successfully from that type of devaluation? Well, check the boards, Captiva certainly has and how. And as we wrote in the last issue of DIR, the SWT merger really makes sense.

2. Product of the Year: Indicius 5.0. Did you see this thing? Great stuff. Kofax has finally figured out how to leverage the Mohomine technology they bought a couple of years ago. They’ve taken SWT what SWT does for Captiva and have gone a step further. Their killer app is currently automatic document separation without separator sheets. Really cool stuff -- to paraphrase Kofax PR guru Michael Troncale.

3. Newcomer of the Year: Peladon Software – Yes, the Mitek renegades were out in force. Got to love their technology for eliminating high-confidence character mistakes.

4. Robot of the Year: You all saw it. I know you were talking about it. That 4DigitalBooks thing from Sweden sure made some interesting entertainment. They should have been charging people to see it. (Wouldn’t that be an interesting marketing ploy? Do you think it would drive up booth traffic if you charged like a quarter or something just to give people the feeling that they were going to a show?)

5. Company of the Year: Hyland Software. What can you say? They show up every year with that huge stadium booth – give away cool gifts like real baseballs and staff their area what seems like 200 people. Always a good buzz around that booth. Hats off to A.J. for setting the tone for the whole spirit of the company.

That’s about it for now. Once again, I’m sorry for not having a party to throw with my awards. Something we’ll have to work on for the future.

Cheers.

RG

Kodak managment change

Interesting news out of Rochester...

Tagging

Does anyone think this could be useful in ECM/document imaging applications?

Microsoft's PDF alternative

We've often said Microsoft needs to recognize PDF. It appears they have, but instead of embracing it (and then attempting to extinguish), they have come up with their own version. I don't know. Don't think it will work, but here we go...

Pentagon Redaction screw-up

Check this out. Pretty bad document mis-managment by the Pentagon.

Here's an updated version of that story - This one actually recommends using magic marker and scanning as a replacement for electronic document redaction!

On more opinion on this. This one seems slightly saner and recommends a specific PDF redaction tool. You would think the Pentagon would be aware of such things. You would think...

Cheers.

RG