ACS Sale

More on this private equity investment stuff. Somewhat related to this, I get a lot of question asking how big the image outsourcing market is. Does anyone have any idea. My best guess is $4-5 billion annually.

Google OCR

Google is sponsoring an Open Source OCR project.

Alfresco Blog

Someone hipped me to this pretty cool post by Alfresco co-founder John Newton, pertaining to Dave DeWalt's departure from EMC. Newton is a former Documentum developer -based in the U.K., who founded Alfresco a couple years ago. Alfresco is an open source ECM entrent.

U.K. imaging acquisition

Version One, one of the leaders in the imaging software market in the U.K. has been acquired by what looks like a large accounting/ERP software firm.

Xerox Global Imaging

Xerox has become the latest digital copier vendor to make an acquisiton to beef up its direct sales efforts. Yesterday, Xerox announced plans to acquire Global Imaging Systems for $1 billion. Global Imaging is a dealer roll-up founded in the 1990s by former Danka and Alco executive Thomas Johnson. It reportedly has a current run rate of around $1.5 billion. Curiously, it does not currently carry Xerox products. You might say Xerox is buying some serious market share with this acquisition.

Xerox competititors like Toshiba and Sharp have also been rolling up dealerships recently, and Ricoh recently announced a major re-org of its sales channels. It's our theory that as copier vendors are forced into solutions sales, they realize they need more control over their salespeople and buying dealers are one way to do this.

Oh yes, and we had a recent exchange on the blog about "the Great American Copier company," in which I proposed Global Imaging as a candidate and someone else suggested Xerox could make a comeback. Seems like this deal could create the best of both worlds - perhaps.

Ralph

TIS-J&B Team Up

Israel-based forms processing specialist Top Image Systems has signed on a J&B Software as a U.S. reseller. J&B is one of the largest software vendors in the remittance processing space. After a couple of earlier tries, TIS has been biding its time before making another run at the U.S. market. J&B seems like a solid partner, and we hope this deal works out for both of them. We still expect another bigger move by TIS this year as the company strives to achieve its goal of $30 million in revenue in 2007, after hitting its $20 million goal last year.

Document Fraud Prevention

This is an interesting story about document fraud protection technology - basically used to prevent people from reproducing documents that shouldn't be reproduced.

Lason

Couple interesting things related to the Lason deal:
1. We reported in July 2004 that investment firm Charterhouse Goup bought Lason, a $140 million company for something like $30 million and the assumption of some senior indebtedness. According to the HOV Services press release, it paid $148 million for the company. On the surface that seems like a nice deal for Charterhouse. Maybe that's why these guys are going private.
2. Also, former Lason President John Messigner was sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay $20 million in restitution for his part in the finacial scam that artificially ran up Lason's stock price in the late 1990s.

ACS Going Private

ACS is the latest oursourcer to go private. Seems to be some sort of trend. First Lason, then SourceCorp, then the biggest one of them all. I can understand that Lason was in dire straits and SourceCorp, was exactly blowing the market out of the water, but ACS has been pretty darn successful on the public market over the past five years. What's the motivation for going private? I read the same thing about another technology-driven industry recently - that a lot of the pubic companies were expected to go private. Is is that the market is so volitile right now?

Oh yes, speaking of Lason, it was recently acquired by an Indian BPO specialist.

Dicom Chairman

Dicom has hired a new non-executive Chairman. Interesting because he's a U.K. guy and also has a high-growth background. High-growth is interesting because Rob Klatell, the new CEO, at least he was new last year, also came from a company with a fairly aggressive growth strategy. Dicom has historically not been that overly aggressive. Also, the company was founded by Swiss and now it has an American CEO and English Chair. Of course, it's stock is traded on the London Exchange and has been for some time.

Regards,

Ralph

Ricoh reorg

Seems to make sense. Focusing their channels a bit. Anybody that does major acquistions like Ricoh has over the years typically needs to make some major moves into order to digest them. So far, Ricoh had avoided these moves. Sometimes it can be a tough pill to swallow for those affected, but such is big busienss.

Open Text Buys Federal Reseller

It seems Open Text has acquired one of its resellers that focuses on the federal government market. Four million for a 50-employee company that is familiar with your product line seems like a pretty good deal.

Intel e-mail mismanagement

This may or may not be the case the ZyLab is inovlved with.

Datacap Parascript form partnership

Automated data capture specialist Datacap, out of Tarrytown, NY, has officially announced a partnership with recognition specialist Parascript. Parascript, which was originally founded in Russia as part of the Glasnost initiative, is now based in Boulder, CO. It's claim to fame and biggest source of revenue is a contract with the USPS for reading addresses on envelopes. Parascript is noted for its ability to recognize cursive writing and has done a couple of installations with Datacap already involving hand-filled order forms for the Baltimore Sun and TV Guide. Parascript appears to be moving forward after a proposed merger with pubically traded Mitek fell through. Both Mitek and Parascript have strong technology in the check recognition market.

ZyLab system being used to support one of the Nation’s largest technology antitrust cases.

From a ZyLab press release:

ZyLAB and Marin IT Provide 65+ Law Firms and Attorney Generals with Web-Based eDiscovery Solution

ZyIMAGE Used to Collaborate in High-Profile California Technology Antitrust Case; System Currently Holding Five Million Case Documents

Vienna, VA, March 6, 2007 – ZyLAB, an innovative developer of Information Access Solutions and Marin IT, a leading provider of networking and application development solutions, today announced that the ZyIMAGE eDiscovery solution is currently in use to support one of the Nation’s largest technology antitrust cases. More than 65 law firms and 14 different Attorneys General are using the hosted application to collaborate on the documents produced by the defendants during the discovery process. In use already for 18 months, the ZyLAB/Marin IT eDiscovery solution allows lawyers to access data in real time and search on topics that have been discovered during depositions.

“This case has produced millions of pages of evidence that our clients must have access to in order to prosecute and prove our case,” said David Cooper of Marin IT. “The ZyLAB/Marin IT solution has dramatically streamlined their ability to locate the information they need in near real time, thus improving overall efficiency. There are hundreds of people working together on this case and without this solution it would have been quite a laborious and difficult process. This hosted eDiscovery solution should serve as a model of excellence for the legal world.”

ZyIMAGE eDiscovery enables organizations to capture, investigate, structure and disclose information in a simple, secure and efficient manner. Built on an XML data repository, the solution provides users with tools to store, search and retrieve vital information through a standard Internet browser. Marin IT is hosting the ZyIMAGE application/Web interface for the users at a data center in Northern California. Connected to the server which is running the application are large disk arrays holding approximately 5,000,000 case documents. Marin IT has installed ssl certificates on the Web server in order to deliver the content in a secure way using https/ssl.

Prior to using this implementation, all of the discovery documents for the cases were delivered in hard copy and then reviewed by the different lawyers and Attorneys General. As the “hot documents” were found they would then be added to a list and copies put into binders and sent via mail around the county for the different law firms to work with. There was no full text search ability, and there was no way to have central repository of data that everyone could use to share the data. As the case has progressed, the deposition summaries and transcripts have been added to a deposition index to make this information available to everyone involved.

“The key motivation for users engaged in eDiscovery is not to miss any archived e-mail, paper document, or electronic file that may have relevance to the case,” said Dr. Johannes Scholtes, President of ZyLAB. “Therefore, eDiscovery searching must concentrate 100 percent on recall rather than on precision. ZyIMAGE eDiscovery empowers users in the antitrust case to find the information they are looking for in seconds and provides sophisticated tools such as hit-highlighting, hit-navigation, customizable relevance ranking, optimized user interaction, text-mining and visualization.”

Attorneys General from Arkansas, California, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Washington and a variety of law firms Nationwide are working on this case and have real-time access to the system.

Scientigo

Remember Scientigo, the guys who said they had the patents on XML and were using the technology to do some advanced classifcation and extraction - in fact, they even signed partnerships with Boeing subsidiary CDG, as well as Canon MEAP partner Ribstone - well, it seems they are out of the ECM and capture business these days and focusing on phone directories. This comes after a change of CEOs late last year.

Ralph

Some of the latest news

Tim Corkery has been named the COO of eCopy. He had been at eCopy for seven years and was previously from senior vice president, worldwide sales and services...Bill Gates Kodak Document Imaging's former GM and VP of sales for US&C, has left the organization... Kofax recently announced a Scan Server installation with Randolph Brooks Credit Union. The implimentation facilitates the remote capture of loan related documentation from branch offices.

Surprise! An update

Once again, we apologize for being so remiss in publishing to this blog. We've been traveling for the past month of so pretty steadily, but that's not really a good excuse. The bottom line is that we are waiting until we can transfer the blog to our home page to really go after it again, and just need some help from Web hosting service. There has definitely been a lot of news, most of it we are trying to cover in the pages of the Document Imaging Report.

Anyhow, we hope to have a new and improved blog online before the AIIM 2007 show in Boston this April.

Best Regards,

Ralph.

Al Shugart

I'm sure you all saw this last month, but here's a good brief story on the life and times of Al Shugart. I'll always remember Al because he got fired from Seagate and formed his own investment company about the same time we were launching a newsletter called Mass Storage News. And Al developed a close relationship with our upstart editor, Dr. Mike Downing and would always make himself available to in depth conversations on the storage industry. Al was truly one of a kind and an IT pioneer.

McMahan at Kodak

Hey, it's been awhile since I've been on the blog. Been busy with a few things like upgrading our home page, adding a some new content and just doing a better overall job organizing it. We've been also cleaning some administrative house on this end. Hoping for a big 2007. Hope you are too.

Couple of significant personnel announcments in the industry
Kodak has apparently hired AIIM Chair Don McMahan to head its North American scanner and service sales. Official announcment doesn't appear to be out yet, but the internal breifing was done yesterday. McMahan spend several years as the VP of sales and marketing at Kodak rival FCPA (Fujitsu Computer Products of America) before a sudden departure in 2005. He quickly resurfaced at Visioneer where he spent just over a year and built a strong VAR channel before leaving in late 2006.

Kodak would seem a good fit for McMahan's skill set - as historically he has focused on what Kodak refers to as the "distributed" part of the market -FCPA and Visioneer being strong players in the fast growing workgroup of sub-$2,000 end of the market. Despite some strong products in the workgroup space, Kodak has mainly struggled to gain significant market share - and McMahan could be the tonic to break that slump. We're looking forward to catching up with McMahan and the Kodak brass at the annual Breakaway event scheduled two weeks from now in Nashville...between now and then we'll be traveling to St. Petersburg for Visioneer's annual partner event, which ironically was started by McMahan last year.

Also, some cool stuff at Iron Mountain http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070111/clth024.html?.v=88. They made their Digital guy a president, so that shows you somewhat where their focus is going.

Finally, did you see that Kodak sold its Health Imaging business?

SOA wave

We recently posted a new section on our Web site, focusing on some of the SOA initiatives now so prevelant in the ECM industry. We recently posted white papers from both Kofax and Captiva that discuss each company's capture-based SOA strategy. Some interesting reading.

Blodgett Named ACS CEO

Looks like data entry software pioneer Lynn Blodgett is in as CEO of ACS.

New Discovery Procedures

Dr Johannes Scholtes, president of document search and retrieval specialist ZyLAB, sent us a link to this article yesterday. It's written by Kevin Roden of Iron Mountain. It covers a lot of the issues we covered back in January when we spoke with Information Nation Warrior author Randy Kahn, but it serves as a good reminder that these new discovery procedures, that first the first time explicitly take into account electronic information, are on the way.

Ralph

SAP ECM

Did I miss something here?

This is from a recent eWeek article on the Oralce/Stellent deal: "Oracle, on this front, is playing a bit of a catch-up game. SAP has had an ECM suite for some time." What suite is that?

Sue Clarke, a senior analyst with the Butler Group, of Butler Direct, based in Hull, England, seems to validate the existance of an SAP ECM suite: "For years SAP has benefited from the lack of ECM functionality from Oracle as it has its own capabilities," Clarke says in the article.

However, she goes on to say she believes the Stellent buy is just one more merger amongst others on the horizon—and that SAP needs to act accordingly to keep up. "In view of the fact that it is unlikely that any of the independent pure-play ECM vendors will survive intact much further into the future … if SAP wishes to regain the initiative over Oracle it needs to become a major ECM player, which can only be achieved through acquisition."

Oh. Does that mean Open Text or may Seperion?

Ralph

Parascript Mitek

The proxy statement has been posted online. In 2005, the combined company had some $30.4 million in revenue ($24 million of which can be attributed to Parascript's operations) with an operating income of $5.6 million, which was negated by $11.5 million in interest expense. The deal is supposed to close sometime early next year. From the best we can tell, the deal values the combined company at somewhere north of $140 million. This is based on investor Plainfield OffShore Holdings receiving 23% of the company in exchange a $35 million investment in 21.9 million shares of Mitek common stock at a conversion price of $1.60 per shares. Of course, Plainfield also get $55 million in senior secured debt in the terms of the deal, so while that number of shares may have a $140 million valuation to Plainfeld, it probably does not truly relfect the open market valuation of the combined company, which will be known as Parascript. Does that make sense?

Ralph

PaperClip

So, it appears PaperClip is selling out to a company that distributes nutritional supplements in China. I'll need to follow-up on this one, but this could be yet another sign of the growing interesting of document management technology in the emerging Chinese market. But then again... well, we'll see.

Voting Machines vs. OCR/OMR

Yet another in the litany of events that make me think our industry could have come up with a better solution for voting. Personally, I was a big fan of the VoteFiler system introduced a year and a half ago by Comfidex, which is a spin off from document imaging super systems specialist R2K, but haven't heard that it's gained much traction since its initial introduction. I guess their in a very tough market controlled by politicos - but when all is said and done, paper ballots a much cleaner than touchscreens.

Office 2007 set for manufacturing

It seems the much anticipated Office 2007 suite is one step closer to becoming a reality. From our perspective, the fun thing about Office 2007 is that, when coupled with SharePoint, for the first time, you can achieve some real document management functionality right out of the box with Microsoft products. Of course, it won't get you very far, but it's enough to get users started and introduced to the concept of ECM, which is where Microsoft's partners can take over.

Authentidate Secure e-mail

We always thought this was a potentially great service offered by this German-U.S. conglomorate that also plays in the traditional document imaging industry with its docStar product line, where former Captiva VP Blaine Owens now works. Authentidate itself has some technology similar to the Fujitsu stuff we highlighted last issue-to ensure that a scanned or other type of electronic document is not altered after a specified date and time. Authentidate also has this stuff, which they have tried unsuccessfully for the most part to market through the USPS. Any ideas on why this doesn't catch on? The ROI seems like a slam dunk.

Stellent Oracle

New Dicom VP of marketing Andrew Pery looks like quite a prophet after he made this statement a couple weeks ago at a Kofax Transform event in Prague. "As players like Microsoft and Oracle are introducing ‘just-good-enough’ content services, pure-play ECM vendors are being forced to consolidate. In the next six months, I expect to see consolidation involving the rest of the mid-tier vendors like Hyland, Interwoven, Vignette, Stellent, etc."

Well, Stellent was the first to go.Who's next? One thing we can say is that, based on the recent FileNet and Stellent deals, the going price for a profitable ECM company seems to be 2.5 times revenue - when you subtract out cash in the bank. FileNet was on track for some $450 million in revenue, had an equal amount in the bank, and was acquired for $1.6 billion. $1.2 billion divided by $450 is 2.5. Stellent, which was probably on track for $140-150 million in annual revenue, had $70 million in the bank, and got $440 million. $370 million divided by $150 rounds to 2.5. Of course, a few years back, EMC acquired Documentum for some 4 times revenue - but that was an all-stock transaction. The more recent Captiva acquisition worked out to somewhere just north of 2.5 times annual revenue.

We did think it was a bit curious that of all the ECM players out there, Oracle opted for Stellent. Now, we've always thought Stellent had good technology, and they have some interesting stuff with their whole Outside In universal viewer, but we thought Oralce would have purchased someone with a larger footprint. Open Text seemed like the most logical choice, especially after Oracle and Open Text announced a strengthened partnership around Oracle's Content and Records Database products released this summer. For whatever reason, that deal didn't take place. Of course, Oralce is rumored to have also turned down FileNet three times, before IBM took them off the market. It's also probably not coincidental that the Stellent deal ocurred only shortly after Open Text closed its acquisition of Hummingbird. That deal may have been the straw the broke the camel's back when it came to Oralce's intent to acquire Open Text. And then there was long-time Oracle partner Documentum, but that ship sailed a few years back, of course. But Stellent? Interwoven, admittedly, would have surprised us less... but now here's the document imaging pitch... One thing Stellent had going for it over Interwoven is a strong document imaging/BPM product line that it picked up from Optika. Maybe, this had nothing to do with it, but I'd stand the Optika imaging technology up against anything Open Text has, probably the old Gauss/Magellen stuff is the closest match, and Oracle sure got it a lot cheaper than if they'd paid $1 billion for Open Text. The Optika imaging stuff, in fact, is the only real current connection we see between these two companies, as Optika has specialized in recent years in J.D. Edwards integration.

Anyways, congrats on the folks at Stellent, on a solid step, hopefully, in the evolution of their business, and we look forward to seeing who is going to hop on the consolidation train next.

Ralph

DITA

Here's a story regarding the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard that we were first introduced to at Harvey Spencer Associates recent conference. At the event, Peter Roden, OASIS diretor of technology development, expressed his opinion that all XML-based content management systems wouold be leveraging DITA. It seems to have something to do with enabling content reuse, which is a great and necessary idea for the evolution of ECM to continue.

Electronic postmark

This electronic postmark stuff is pretty cool. It's like certified e-mail. I did a briefing with Authentidate on it a few years ago. They also own a document imaging company, as well as some technology for timestamping document images. Unforunately, I've also read that their stuff with the USPS, for whatever reason, hasn't taken off. Maybe it has to do with the USPS marketing program for it, as I haven't really seen too much advertisting for it. Apparently the USPS is looking at alternative providers and Authentidate is applauding the decision.

ARMA

Back stateside after a week in Prague for Kofax Transform '06 - the European version. Well attended event. I think there were close to 400 resellers (individuals, not companies, but still a lot of companies) represented. Interesting thing about the European market - it's still doesn't seem to be one market. Although the Euro seems pretty well accepted, language barriers, at least, still exist. Even though everyone does speak some kind of common language, it's still cumbersome to converse in other than a native tongue (for many people). Dicom CEO Rob Klatell explained that this type of environment mean it's advantageous for Dicom to maintain its distribution infrastructure in Europe.

Unfortunately, I'm not attending ARMA this week, although that's typically a fairly small show. There was a lot of talk a month ago about AIIM and ARMA getting together, but apparently it all fell through, and now ARMA has recently announced an alliance with SNIA - a storage newtorking organization. Sorry, but I think AIIM would have made more sense.

Oh, yes, wanted to link you to an interesting Iron Mountain announcement from ARMA. Obviously, Iron Mountain holds quite a bit of sway in that world. I like their direction because they aren't afraid to invest in electronic infrastructure, while at the same time, they aren't quick to dismiss their paper roots as archaic. They seem to understand the balance that exists between paper and electronic documents - something we try very hard to be concious of here at DIR.

Finally, I apologize for the lack of recent posts on the Web site. We were really getting on a roll there, but have run into some technical difficulties - this is the reason for the ugly code line that may be displaying across the top of your browser. I've been trying to get this fixed and promise to get us back up to speed there shortly.

thanks.

Ralph

Questex InfoTrends

It appears that Questex and InfoTrends are merging. Questex is the Advanstar spin-off that runs AIIM/On Demand as well as some other IT-centric trade shows. InfoTrends, we best know as the compilers of information on document scanner trends and sales. InfoTrends actually was acquired by an organization called CAPVentures a couple years ago and CAPVentures founder Charlie Pesko started the On Demand show - so there is some definite synergy...

E-mail mismanagement- again

Now, we recognize there is a major problem with mismanagment of e-mail, and even IM, messages as records, but is it really appropriate to cite the Mark Foley case as evidence of this, as AIIM does in this release? I mean, after all, if you are trying to promote better e-mail management, aren't you kind of saying that ECM could have helped Foley hide is tracks? And do we really want our technology associated with that. Imagine the commerical you could do with John Mark Karr or someone. "If it wasn't for ECM technology, I'd be doing time with Jack Abranoff...

That all said, AIIM does provide some telling statistics even in its preview of the study results.

AIIM ARMA talks

It seems AIIM/ARMA had some merger talks that didn't bear any fruit and now AIIM is letting it's members know this a couple weeks before the ARMA show. Here's Alan Pelz-Sharpe's view on it. He's a pretty good ECM analyst.

Arobat 8 review

Here's a link to a pretty useful review of Adobe Acrobat 8. We wrote about the recently announced product in our Sept. 22 issue. Like us, this reviewer is impressed with the ability to combine multiple document types in a single PDF wrapper, while maintaining the original file format. That is a very useful document management feature. And of course, she also cites the upgraded collaboration funcationality. It's this kind of stuff that's going to keep Microsoft's XPS on the backburner for awhile, in terms of adoption.

Ralph

HP MFP Announcement

A couple days ago, HP came out with what one of its pre-sales support guys told me was its biggest MFP announcement ever. Now, there is quite a bit there, including four new MFP devices with very low prices. HP is an intriguing combatent in the digital copier market. While, the other top players are all married to dealer channels, HP goes through VARs or direct sales. As a result, HP's established relationships are with IT people, rather than the purchasing agents, that dealers often work with.

HP is trying to sell its MFPs like it sells its successful printer line - not lease it, like dealers do. And as copiers become more the realm of IT, HP would seem to be in prime position to make some real noise. Only problem is, I'm not sure how great their MFP hardware is. That said, HP has definitely upgraded its stand-alone scanners in the past year, and they've always had fairly good printers, so why shouldn't they have good MFPs? You might say it's because the UI's suck (maybe they don't, I'm just postulating here...) Still, HP has a partnership wtih eCopy, the king of UI, and they also partner with other software vendors like NSi, Omtool, and, and now even Kofax. This should also be able to help steer them in the right direction, at least. Take note, HP is moving rapidly into the digital copier market, and expect their traction to accelerate in the next couple years.

Ralph

Shredding

So, what's exactly the relationship between document imaging and document shredding - aside from the fact that some really bad scanners can accomplish both.

Acrobat 8

Here's an interesting post that discusses the latest release of Adobe's popular Acrobat softawre. It seems to say that Adobe has done such a great job with previous version of Acrobat, and with promoting PDF as a de facto standard, that its new technology in this area is pretty blase. Kind of an interesting concept and one that plays right along with Nuance's strategy behind its PDF Converter (the Avis of PDF) product.

Ralph

German Patent Office

IBM has landed a contract to install a document management and workflow system at the German Patent Office. From this article, it seems like they weren't using any form of electronic document system before, but I find that hard to beleive. I think the conversion of patent documents to digital images was one of the first biggest projects undertaken in the U.S. Anyways, from what I can tell the U.S. Patent Office is trying to upgrade it's digital imaging system. I think I'll try and track down some details.

Ralph

Xerox expands service bureaus

Lot of document imaging-centric news coming out of Xerox. Guess there having a big press event in New York where they're announcing all this.

TIS Invoice Win

Top Image Systems announces another impressive invoice processing win in Europe.

Patriot Act

In this industry, we love to talk about how compliance drives buisness. After years of talk, we definitely saw a lot of this in regards to meeting HIPAA requirements. The Patriot Act has been another buzzword related to compliance. And while we've haven't seen a lot of traction direclty related to it to date, this joint solution by FileNet and BearingPoint seems like it should score some wins.

Xerox AOL

Intersting story that just moved about Xerox Global Services landing a big document imaging installation contract with AOL. I'm interested to know what kind of hardware and sofware will be used to fill the bill. May do a follow-up for the newsletter.

Desktop Scanner Reviews

Here's an interesting review of the ScanSnap as well as the NeatReceipts package. It's kind of fun to read, but sorely lacking in some details. Maybe the writer ran into word count restraints.

Visioneer

So, we're assuming most of you have heard the news out of Pleasanton, that there has been a major personnel shakeup at Visioneer. Yes, Don McMahan, who was hired last year to lead Visioneer's transition into the document-centric, business scanning market is out. McMahan, who helped architect a successful VAR program at Fujitsu Computer Products of America (FCPA) in the late 1990s and early 2000s, joined Visioneer shortly after leaving FCPA early last year. It seemed like a solid fit, as Visioneer was targeting the fast-growing workgroup scanning segment, where FCPA had traditionally dominated. McMahan and right-hand man Rusty James, who also came to Visioneer from FCPA, worked quickly, boasting of several hundred VAR signees in their first year on board. Visioneer also watched its market share numbers rise solidly in 2005-presumably with help from its recently fortified channel, as VARs have historically been the key to selling lower-priced document scanners. However, last Friday, we learned that McMahan and James had both resigned from Visioneer and that possibly five other employees left with them. As recently as May's AIIM show, McMahan seemed strongly entrenched, as he accepted the appointment as Chairman of AIIM's board - a position which we presume he is retaining.

McMahan's departure from Visioneer caught many people off guard, as did his departure from FCPA 18 months previous. We never have received a definitive story as to why he departed FCPA. Visioneer CEO Murray Dennis has promised to talk to us next week, when he names McMahan's replacement. Of course, this is assuming the company hasn't been sold to OEM partner Xerox, and McMahan's and his marketing staff were deemed extraneous to the Xerox business model. As always, we'll keep you posted.

Ralph

FileNet IBM View

I think I expressed my opinions on the FileNet/IBM deal fairly clearly in the latest edition of DIR. This guy does a nice job summing up some of the stuff that was expressed in the conference call. He basically says, it's about the workflow and processes that FileNet specializes in, which IBM is adding to its core competency. That, of course, and the customer base.

Ralph

More Election problems

I came across this story while vacationing in Ohio last week. (Yes, I'm from Western PA, so sometimes we vacation in Ohio.) But anyways, it has always struck me as odd that we have all this great forms processing, data capture technology out there, but we still can't get our electoral processes right.

Ralph

Why'd IBM Do It?

We explore this question at length in this week's issue of DIR, coming soon. We will tell you that the deal, to us in the ECM know at least (wink, wink, nod, nod) is more complex than Big Blue just wanting to increase its software business, as many pundits, such as this one, are suggesting. After all, only something like 40% of FileNet's revenue is from software. The rest is from services. Then again, IBM knows a little about services as well. So, why'd they really do it? Well, you're going to have to get DIR to find out. (Unless, of course, you think you know, than please share.) Comments below.

IKON-Adobe e-forms

Thought is was kind of interesting that copier mega-dealer IKON has signed up Adobe as a premier partner for its e-forms solution. E-forms, of course, elminate paper, which has historically been the lifeblood of IKON's business. Kudos for IKON for having the vision to realize that it's about the processes, not the paper, and fully embracing electronic doucment management technologies.

Census Technology

Intereting article on the improved data collection methods being used for the 2010 U.S. Census.

More on XPS

Don Fluckinger of the PDFZone does good work. Here's his latest on XPS and the effect it will have on the PDF market.

North Carolina Unhappy with ACS

Bad news for ACS - the State of North Carolina is unhapply with its efforts at setting up a system for processing Medicaid claims. At least I think it's a claims processing system - they call it a "billing system."

Ralph

Aurde, Inc.

Last month, we ran a brief in DIR discussing some of the ties that document conversion specialist Audre, Inc. had with convicted former California Congressman Duke Cunningham. This Vanity Fair article gets into it in more detail. Wow, it seems Duke's road to ruin began with quesionable conversion deals with Audre and later a company called ADCS. Check it out for yourself.

Ralph

Hummingbird-Open Text

I guess we should have seen this coming after Symphony's relatively modest offer to acquire Hummingbird a few weeks back. But Open Text appears to be after their Canadian counterpart again. If you remember, back in the day, the late-1990s, Open Text tried a hostile takeover of PC Docs, whose management ran away from them like its hair was on fire. PC Docs instead accepted from Hummingbird, which was not a direct competitor, like Open Text was. I seem to remember that maybe PC Docs executives felt they'd have a better chance of staying on board if they took Hummingbird's offer over Open Text's. Open Text, of course, then upped their offer and made one last gasp at acquiring PC Docs. Things got kind of nasty before PC Docs finally went to Hummingbird - and PC Docs management team ended up mostly being shown the door anyhow. Well, seven years later, guess what, Open Text is trying another guerilla takeover of PC Docs - this time bidding on the entire Hummingbird entity. Symphony is just a holidng company, so the Open Text acquisition probebly makes more sense. However, Open Text has offered Hummingbird shareholders a dollar more per share, or a 4% premium over the Symphony price, so it might not be worth it for Hummingbird to change suiters at this juncture. If Open Text gets offers somewhere in the 10% range, look for this deal to be a slam dunk.

Ralph

LizardTech Re-org

This is an odd story about LizardTech that recently came across the wire. It seems Carlos Domingo, who had been pretty much running the show in the U.S. has stepped upstairs to the position of chairman and is moving back to his home country of Spain. Didn't see LizardTech at AIIM this past year, after visiting with them the past couple years at the event. It seemed like things might have been going better after they won the New Yorker archive project. As a market for their mixed raster content DjVu format seemed finally to be developing. Hopefully this will continue under the new management. Of course improvements in PDF have someone marginlized the company's fringe file format.

Ralph

Alfresco FileMark

Here's a story about a neat integration between FileMark and Alfresco. FileMark is a high-end archiving, imaging, COLD, and workflow vendor currently being run by former Tower Technology marketing wizard Bill Zastrow. Zastrow left Tower when it was acquied by Vignette a couple years go. Incidentally, Vignette seems to be doing well in the wake of the acquistion. Alfresco, of course, is the Open Source document/content management developer founded by former Documentum personnel. Kevin Cochrane, a former VP of Interwoven has also been brought on board. Alfresco seems to have pretty solid software, but of course, doesn't have an imaging component. So, I guess what FileMark is doing with them is probably similar to what everybody else is doing with SharePoint. Just thought it was worth mentioning.

Ralph

South African company Looking for Software partner

As far as I can tell, this is legit. I have corresponded with the author of this e-mail. He seems to the co-proprietor of South African paper storage company that is looking for a document imagnig software partner. They are unhappy with their current partner. Here's the text of the e-mail I received: (I have not corrected spelling or grammer.)


Hi Ralph

My name is Langa Mkhwanazi from South Africa, I am a partner and in charge of operations in newly formed Document storage and Scanning Company called Safefile. We sort of manage to develop a box storage system software for our Warehouse which cost us a lot of money. We however have been let down Marjory by people that promised to develop a scanning, indexing and viewing software for us, with major financial losses for our business.

Some of our problems are, we depend on these people for the livelihood of our business, in that they control the software with out us getting the source codes as to customize the systems to our clients needs. Some have offered mediocre systems that do not allow us to penetrate industries like the financial sector. Over under above that, we have to sell this viewing software to our customers on their behalf at ridiculous amounts and end up losing on the contract.

I am looking for help in developing our own scanning, indexing and viewing program. We are using Kodac scanners and so are able to scan our documents, but when it comes to indexing and providing solutions via our viewing system for our clients we are no where. We cannot even provide a software that allow our clients to manage their documents, email, fax, create workflows.

We have been bleed dry financial, but we need a Safefile owned software to perform our business, Ralph we don’t even have a workflow for our own scanning services.

We need help and any help will do or we will go down.

Regards,


Langa Mkhwanazi
Operations Director
Safefile (Pty) Ltd
l.mkhwanazi@safefile.co.za

Xerox CTO

Here's a somewhat intersting interview with the CTO of Xerox.

More on XPS

Here's an insightful article that discusses some of the features/functionality of XPS, the PDF alternative that Microsoft will release with its Vista OS sometime next year. Interestingly, the writer seems to position XPS the same way that Microsoft partner ScanSoft/Nuance has been positioning its PDF capabilities, as a lower overhead product when compared to Adobe Acrobat, aimed at office workers and their needs, leaving the graphics world to Adobe.

Ralph

Google

Last post for today. This article probably explains why Google will not surpass Microsoft, as much as I like their server-based computing model.

TiS wins smokin' deal

More evidence of successful invoice processing/ERP integration: TiS wins a contract with Altadis, Europe's leading manufacturer of tobacco products.

FileNet Document Encryption

FileNet has teamed up with storage security expert Decru to create a hardware/software solution for ecrypting document based on user-defined groups.

Microsoft PDF

It seems Microsoft and Adobe have had a falling out over their agreement to incorporate PDF in Office. We remember when this project was first announced - curiously, it was after Microsoft had launched its XPS "PDF-killer" format. Not surprisingly, Microsoft expects to get sued by Adobe. Microsoft is notorious for pretending to partner with company just so they can get a peek at their technology.

Hummingbird deal

It seems that some Hummingbird investors are up in arms about the $456 million being paid by a California firm to take Hummingbird private. One gentleman has even encouraging voting against it. The hope is that a strategic buyer, like a FileNet or Oracle will be found. I guess, based on $1.5 billion that Documentum got from ECM, Hummingbird shareholders might have a right to be disappointed.

JPEG Patents

There seems to be quite a bit of discussion in our industry about the recent USPTO ruling on the invalidity of major chunks of the JPEG patent that Forgent has leveraged so far to generate some $100 million in revenue. It looks like someone finally got one of these patent rulings right. Hurrah! Let's hope there is more of this to come.

File Scrub

This looks like some pretty cool and useful document management technology. Aren't these the same guys that originally developed LizardTech's geospacial compression stuff? In fact, it appears LizardTech's old CEO, John "Grizz" Deal might even be involved in this venture as well.

Intriguing New CAS

Here's a new content-addressed storage company founded by the guy that apparently invented Centera. Now, I have trouble telling one CAS device from another, but I assume there are some people out there that really understand this stuff...I'd like to say things were easier when all we had to worry about was optical, but I know that's not the case.

Google vs. Microsoft

Here's a Cringely column that addresses the very issue I wrote about yesterday. Yes, he takes Google's side as well.

AIIM Wrap

Another AIIM is in the books. Wow! What a show. It was nice to see everybody who I saw. I apologize to everyone I missed, especially those I had appointments with. I think I need to hire some correspondents just to fully cover the show.

There was a lot of good quality mature technology there. I got to see a lot of scanners, I acted as a Best of Show judge in the workgroup and departmental scanner categories. Compared to five years ago, boy, have feeders and image processing come along way. The real current of the show, however, seemed to be pulling in the direction of server-based computing. More on this in the next issue of DIR - but there are two camps being orgazined. Microsoft supporters are in one and Google supporters are in the other. Guess which side wants to move functionality off the desktop and onto the server?

Based on the fun I had last year with this, I thought I'd offer my informal, very, very informal, DIR Best of AIIM award. Please, take note, these are in now way associated with AIIM sponsored Best of Show awards for which I got to test all the scanners.

Thanks.

Best Product: Scott Blau's SOA-based forms processing product. Love the concept of making data extraction (and also image processing by the way) available as series of services. It is the most efficient way to handle this. Oh yeah, and guess whose side I'm on in the above mentioned debate.
Most polarizing product: The Kofax Avalon/Document Scan Server. People loved it or hated it.
Biggest, only in Philadelphia, inconvenience of the year award: I think we finally figured out how to deal with the Penn graduation on Monday, only to be hit with a city-wide 24-hour taxi-strike on Tuesday. Next year - Boston - the week of the Boston Marathon.
Best Storyteller of the Year: Art Gingrande. Well, they were a little long, but Art is apparently in law school, so he should fit right in.
Best Disappearing Act: Chris Thompson. He was missed by many, but everyone seemed happy for him as well.
Best Soon-To-Be Disappearing Act: Go Reynolds!
Best Digital Copier-related product: Sharp. More SOA stuff.
Best AIIM Chairman of the Year: Don McMahan. Congrats, Don.
Yawner of the year: It was 2 p.m. on Thursday and Xerox was showing me yet another proprietary digital copier capture platform. Sorry about that. The guy demoing it was nice enough, but seriously, I nearly fell asleep on my feet.
Story of the Year: Art's bit about a trash can and a CEO - oh yes, and OCR software.
Dinner of the Year: Suzie Fu's - something like that - French/Asian wonderful food.
Party of the Year: I believe I was singing Karekoke at one point.
Casting the longest shadow: Microsoft
Best Apparent Turnaround: Scan-Optics. Seem to be doing great a year after a major reorg. I guess, we'll see long-term, but CEO Paul Yantis seemed is optimistic.

Cheers

Why I love AIIM

Yesterday, I've having a conversation about my blog. I mention one that one of my favorite posts occurred while waiting for an hour on the Philadelphia runway when I handed out my impromptu DIR "Best of AIIM Awards." The marketing people I'm sitting with get a laugh when I explain that being trapped on an airplane is a great muse. The software engineer with us mere says, "nice battery."

Anyhow, the big talk out here early seems to revolve around Microsoft SharePoint and its future effect on the ECM market. There is more than one person who thinks it spells doom for people like Open Text and other EDM specialists. Ironically, however, this is also the week of Microsoft's own SharePoint convention, so a lot of their heavy hitters aren't even here. If I'm Open Text, I'm not too worried yet. (I love the way the spell checker in the thing - which is owned by Google I understand - doesn't recognize "SharePoint.)

Ralph

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...