Vignette hits bump

It looks like high-end document imaging/WCM specialist Vignette hit a small bump this quarter. At least they are still making money. I must admit that I was crediting a lot of their recent success to their acquisition of Autstrian imaging power Tower (was it Software or Technology?) and was a bit worried when they started talking about their hopes for next-generation WCM systems to boost revenue in the second half of 2007.

I love the reference to "cloud computing" (which I think is the SaaS model) in this article about Adobe's recent word processing acquisition.

Nuance and Iron Mountain both made recent acqusitions that move them further into the health care vertical. Nuance, which has a very successful speech-to-text business with its Dragon Naturally Speaking product line for medical transcriptions, acquired a medical imagnig (not document imaging) company. Iron Mountain bought on off-site medical records sepcialist. On a somewhat related note, our pediatrician's office is currently moving to an EMR system and actually told my wife they were trying to do more diagnoses on the phone to avoid havnig patients come in during the transition. Of course, our son had a double ear-infection that they couldn't properly diagnose over the phone, so we had to go in a couple days later anyhow. And then they supposedly electronically faxed the perscription to the pharmacy, which never got it, and the pharmacist made some comment along the lines of "that stuff never works when they try it." Oh well, score one (or two I guess) for the luddites.

Ralph

Ralph

Adobe Word Processing

Adobe is doing some pretty cool stuff to attack Microsoft Office:

From an e-mail I received from their PR agency:
"Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Virtual Ubiquity and its ground-breaking online word processor, Buzzword. The acquisition furthers Adobe's commitment to foster a vibrant ecosystem for rich Internet application (RIA) development that delivers breakthrough experiences built on Adobe AIR. Separately, Adobe added a new file sharing service to its current online document services. Codenamed "Share," the beta service will make it easier than ever for people to share, publish and organize documents online....

"Buzzword, an elegant online word processor, enables individuals to work together to create high quality, page perfect documents. Because it was built with Adobe Flex software and runs in the Adobe Flash Player, Buzzword enables greater document quality, outstanding typography, page layout controls, and robust support for integrated graphics, regardless of the browser or device. The application also will run on Adobe AIR, offering users a hybrid online/offline experience and the ability to work with both hosted and local documents. The powerful collaboration capabilities in Buzzword enable multiple authors to edit and comment on documents from anywhere, at anytime, while document creators can set permissions that virtually eliminate version control chaos. For more information on the acquisition and access to Buzzword beta software, please visit http://www.adobe.com/go/buzzwordfaq....

"Adobe also made available today a free online document sharing service, codenamed "Share." Users simply select the documents they want to share, send a message to recipients, and set whether the files will be publicly accessible or restricted. Built with Adobe Flex technology, the rich interface provides a smooth experience, integrating simple workflows to upload and share documents with high quality online previews to speed up finding the right document. Additionally, the beta will include a set of REST APIs to let developers create mash-ups with their applications, including storing and accessing files, as well as creating thumbnails and Flash-based previews of documents. People can learn more about the service and sign-up for access at http://www.adobe.com/go/labs_share."

ACS SharePoint

ACS is entering the SharePoint customization business. SharePoint is an interesting ECM framework, but definitely creates some opportunities for development work on top of it. It kind of opens things up a bit in this market, making pricing/solutions delivery a bit more flexible. Would a user rather pay for services associated with Sharepoint or more developed ECM software from more traditonal vendors?

Procure-to-pay, order-to cash

For the past couple weeks, I've been trying to get my arms around the whole concept of procure-to-pay and order-to-cash and understand how capture, document imaging, and workflow can be used to increase efficiencies across the board and tie all these things together.

Had a great conversation recently with Mark Fairchild, a senior VP at BancTec, who explained how these elements can be employed in a shared services-type environment to maximize a user's investments in document imaging technology.

Indicative of the potential of this type of deployment for capture vendors are three recent deals announced by Top Image Systems (TIS) through its partnership with J&B Software. TIS is an Israel-based forms processing specialist and J&B is a Philly-area remittance/payments specialist. The impressive thing about these deals from the TIS perspective is their size, which averages $300,000 per installation. These are not just payment processing customers adding a little bit of forms technology to round out their solutions. These guys are obviously doing some pretty heavy duty capture.

We will continue to provide you with coverage on this emerging market for document imaging technology.

Ralph

SharePoint 2008 Show

Somebody recently pointed to us that Microsoft has a big SharePoint event scheduled the same time as AIIM 2008. Bill Gates is supposed to speak at this thing. Based on all attention that Microsoft and SharePoint received at AIIM 2007, this seems like an unfortunately coincidence. It is a conincidence, isn't it?

Ralph

Xerox Color; Open Text invoices

Xerox announced its latest color printing products today, which are being advertised as having the same cost over of ownership as comparable black-and-white models. The printers rely on the solid-ink sticks that Xerox has been developing for some five years. As with any first-generation product, we'll keep our fingers crossed as to how well these work out and how fast they are adopted, but we've always said that more affordable color printing will lead to more color scanning and the chance to apply more advanced compression technology to document images. Sounds like fun.

Open Text has introduced an updated version of its Vendor Invoice Management software for managing the workflow of invoices in an SAP environment. We've been doing a lot of coverage on invoice processing lately, and ReadSoft, the leading vendor in the invoice capture space, noted that it find itself most often competing with Open Text, as the companies go toe-to-toe for SAP-related business. ReadSoft bought a team of SAP workflow specialists last year and offers a product that competes directly with Open Text's VIM system. ReadSoft is enjoying great success in the this market, and it sounds like Open Text is doing okay as well. As we noted in our past issue, invoice processing has always been a good market for doucment imaging/workflow systems, and now advanced capture methods appear to be taking it to the next level.

Cheers.

Ralph

Invoice processing

We did a great couple issues recently on the state of the invoice processing market. We learned all sorts of neat things, from vendors who were very forthcoming with information. If you're interested in taking a look at our study, please get in touch with me.

Here's little bit of what we wrote that we've posted on our VAR Page.

Thanks.

Ralph

Automated book scanning made easy

For those of you who thought this was so hard...

Xerox Buys eMortgage specialist

This is kind of cool. It seems Xerox is buying a business that specializes in electronic mortgage processes. I guess it goes along with their DocuShare technology, in that it's designed to replace paper-driven processes, wiht electronic ones.


ROCHESTER, N.Y., and ATLANTA, Sept., 12, 2007 – Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) plans to buy Advectis®, Inc. for $32 million. Advectis is the provider of one of the mortgage industry’s most widely-used solutions for electronic document collaboration.
Xerox’s expertise in document outsourcing and services led the company to Advectis, a privately-owned business based in Atlanta. In a predominately paper-based industry, Advectis’ Web-based BlitzDocs Collaboration Suite helps lenders, brokers and investors manage the process needed to underwrite, audit, collaborate, deliver and archive loan documents electronically. Taking paper out of the process, the BlitzDocs® patented technology helps users reduce costs associated with the lending process, deliver better service, decrease credit risk by improving documentation processes and build a competitive advantage in capturing new loan applications.
“Anyone who has ever bought a home knows that the mortgage business is dependent on paper. Filling out an extensive number of forms is time and labor-intensive work,” said John Kelly, president, Xerox Global Services North America. “We’re looking to help clients reduce costs and transform their business by offering a better experience for both end-users and operations. Xerox’s expertise in automating document processes is an ideal fit with Advectis’ BlitzDocs paperless solution for mortgages. In an industry that is ripe for change, Advectis offers technology that improves productivity for its users while giving lenders better control of their processes.”
According to Craig Focardi, research area director for the retail banking practice of research firm TowerGroup, “Enterprise content management systems are reducing the great paper chase in loan origination, where a lender controls the paper loan file and manually redistributes documents multiple times to multiple parties. Lenders are increasingly adopting document imaging and electronic content management as a major area of cost savings, faster loan processing and improved customer service.”
The amount of paper associated with this industry leads to inefficient processes which, best case, are productivity drains and, worst case, can lead to a loss of control in the quality of the loans. TowerGroup estimates document management costs in loan origination totaled $3.2 billion last year.
A BlitzDocs electronic loan folder mirrors the paper loan folder used today but improves efficiencies in the loan cycle, allowing mortgage participants to view and process online documents anytime, anywhere. Clients benefit from a network with more than 35,000 broker shops, the top seven mortgage insurance companies and four of the top due diligence providers.
“With this acquisition, Advectis is positioned to create even stronger offerings, services and technologies for our clients,” said Greg Smith, co-founder and chief executive officer of Advectis. “Partnering with Xerox makes perfect sense for the future of our business. Our combined expertise and resources means increased collaboration and decreased loan processing costs for BlitzDocs users.”
Advectis was founded in 2000 and currently employs about 41 people, most of whom are based at the company’s headquarters in Atlanta. Upon completion of the acquisition, all employees are expected to join Xerox. Smith will remain head of the organization, reporting to Kelly.
Xerox’s all-cash purchase of Advectis also includes an additional performance-based supplement to the sale price. The acquisition is expected to close in the next 30 days, subject to customary closing conditions.
Xerox’s industry-leading document technology and services portfolio includes consulting and outsourcing services, records management, digital imaging, e-discovery for litigation support and managed services in more than 160 countries.
Through its acquisition strategy, Xerox is identifying successful companies whose offerings align with Xerox’s commitment to innovation and reducing the complexity of document management. Last year, Xerox acquired Amici LLC, a leading provider of electronic-discovery services, primarily supporting litigation and regulatory compliance, and XMPie, which provides variable information software for the graphic arts and marketing industries.

Kofax

Yes, we've been giving Kofax a hard time lately because of its constant reorganizations and lackluster financial results. However, a couple press releases from last week indicate some of the potential that the capture marketshare leader has for turning things around. The first involved an invoice processing win and the second a significant distributed capture win. These are the two hottest segments within the document capture space, and Kofax conceivably could be a powerhouse in both areas - not something too many vendors can claim.

Cheers.

Ralph

HSA 2007

Just wrapping up Harvey Spencer's annual capture conference up here in Long Island. Another solid event. Speakers included Harvey, the head of technology from the State of West Virginia, a woman from Verizon's billing department, Prascilla Emery, and several others. I moderated a panel on the "next generaiton of distributed scanning," which I feel includes embedded apps, in MFPs and network scanners, as well as "single-button" functionaliy like Visioneer's OneTouch. These types of apps are tied together by the fact that they are designed to be easier to use than traditional scanning apps, and they also have an element of pull vs. push scanning. In other words, you can use them to launch some sort of enterprise/network driven workflow. I guess the Kofax DSS box also falls into this categorey. Anyhow, we had a bit of a tough time tying together the connection between scanners and digital copiers, but it's my believe that end users want one capture system they can run across both types of devices and that can be administered centrally. Call me crazy, but that's what I'd like to see delivered. I think middleware providers and eCopy and NSi can already deliver such a thing, so I guess there's hope, but the hardware vendors seem clueless as to this desire for a single, mixed environment hardware approach.

Anyhow, here's a list of some of the companies represented at the event:A2iA; Abbyy; Anydoc; Anacomp; Anoto; Autonomy/Cardiff, Banctec; Bell & Howell, Brainware; Captaris; Captovation; DataCap; DataIntro; Dicom/Kofax; eCopy; EMC/Captiva, Epson; Fairfax Imaging; HP; IBM; IBML; Iron Mountain; J&B Software, Kodak; Mitek; NCS/Pearson; Nuance; NSI; ODT; Omtool; Opex; Paradatec; PDI; Top Image Systems, and Visioneer. It's a great place for networking if you're looking to partner with these types of businesses.

Cheers. (Got to go grab my coffee now.)

Ralph

ECM valuations on the rise

It looks like Open Text's stock value is up is up like 25%, based on a very strong finacial report. Open Text's income grew like 75%, after the company apparently successfully digested rival Hummingbird, which it acquired last year, which apparently has surprised some people. Vignette and EMC are also pretty close to their 52-week high. Of pulically traded ECM companies, only Interwoven, seems to be struggling a bit. This is interesting of course, when contrasted to capture vendors like Dicom and ReadSoft, who as we noted in our last post, are struggling a bit with their valuations. Of course, Belgian OCR/ICR/capture specialist I.R.I.S. is doing well, as is Nuance. Take it all for what it's worth, but to us it seems ECM is up, basic capture is down, transactional capture is up (This view is of course, based on much more than these stock prices - in fact, it's a lot based on stuff that's appeared in DIR over the past few months.)

Cheers.

Ralph

Dicom-ReadSoft report results

A couple of European-based capture specialists recently reported their results of the period ending June 30. For ReadSoft, the period represents the first half of 2007; For Dicom, it's a year-end report for fiscal 2007. ReadSoft reported a strong second quarter with 11% growth, leading to 9% growth through the first six months of 2007. Dicom, meanwhile, reported a flat 12 months of sales, with a slight increase in profitability. Interestingly, although Dicom's Kofax subsidiary is often recognized as the capture market leader, ReadSoft's "transactional-based" processing applications are where Dicom wants to go. Also, it's probably worth noting that ReadSoft does its busienss primarily in Europe, where the Euro is now much stronger than it was against the dollar a couple years ago, while Kofax still does the majority of its business in the U.S. So, a combination of that and the devaluation of the batch capture applicaitons where Kofax reigns sumpreme has hurt its business. Interestingly, maybe because expecations were set low enough, Dicom's stock doesn't seem to have been negatively affected by the year-end financial announcement.

Ralph

SOX Musical Comedy Spot

Click on the MMVI picture. Apparently this video was made by billionaire business man Sam Zell, who makes a musical comedy video about economics (yes, a musical comedy video about economics) ever year. This year, he rips apart Sarbanes-Oxley. Pretty amusing.

First post of fall

Got the kids off to school today. Much quieter around here. Hopefully will leave me more time (and energy) to blog. Preparing to travel to the annual HSA Capture Conference next week. There I will be presenting on the top seven news trends of 2007, which got me thinking about two themes in particular:
1. The changing Interface of distribtued capture
2. The adoption of invoice processing - as outlined in my last issue, there are like some 500 North American installations of invoice capture, I'm guessing like a 1,000% increase over three years ago.

Distributed capture and invoice processing are two trends that we talked about a lot of years that have both now become an increasing reality. So, I guess there is some value to this speculation that we run in DIR.

Optical scan voting

I've always loved when document scanning is employed in voting and still strongly think that we should use more of it, because of the foolproof paper tails.

Iron Mountain RM

Looks like Iron Mountain has bought Accutrac, which develops records management software for both hard copy and electronic documents. Last issue, June 15, we talked with Iron Mountain about its increased focus on document imaging and the Accutrac software should help with that. Accutrac has partnerships with the likes of TAB, Omtool, and ImageTag, all of whom are in the document imaging space. Iron Mountain already has an investment in ImageTag.

Xerox Search

Xerox has introduced some new search technology. We're not sure how this fits in with the rest of its product lines, but as is typical with Xerox it seems like pretty cool technology.

Buyers Lab Scanner Rankings

This is kind of an interesting piece, although they did make sure they got almost everyone a mention in some categorey.

Cardiff, Standards

This is a fairly interesting announcement for a couple reasons: First off, it dicusses a standard that involves straight through processing (STP). STP is a great term for capture, workflow, document imaging processes. Also, it illustrates some of the advantageous Cardiff is starting to gain in the market with its combined e-forms/paper capture strategy. Mark Seamans, Cardiff's CEO, was in town today to meet with us, and he explained how Cardiff is leveraging Autonomy's presense, along with its fairly unique combination of technologies, to make some real headway. We admit we had some initial doubts about the ties between forms processing and e-forms, but Cardiff's recent success seems to be proving its on the right path. More from our interview with Seamans in our next issue.

Adobe -Kinko's

Feels good to be able to post again. I started having some major computer problems a couple weeks ago, regarding the power port to my laptop, which I use for almost everything I do. Turns out to be a common problem with Dell laptops that the power port comes loose from the mother board, or something along those lines, and Chuck over at Complete Computers here in Erie, soldered it back together for me, actually, according to him at least, improving on the original design of the machine. Hopefully this works, as I have been a bit crippled over the past week especially... that all said, I have been inspired to carry on by the talk given this week at ReadSoft's annual conference in New Orleans. That keynote is the GM of Superdome and oversaw its resurrection. We're talking a $200 million project, so I guess the $125 I spent to fix my laptop wasn't so bad afterall.

Anyhow, this deal between Kinko's and Adobe is probably one that should have been worked out long ago.

Electronic Health Care Records

This sounds like an important committee. Whether they can actually get anything done, who knows? We've been trying to establish a standard, national, portable, electronic health care record for years. HIPAA, as well as increased document imaging initiatives to improve efficiencies have definitely gone a long way towards putting some of the pieces in place, but there is still some serious work left to be done.

Ralph

Latest Cringely Column

My favoriate on-line columnist, Bob Cringely, is stuck on an anti-IBM rant lately, like for the last three weeks. It's interesting, however, because of the influence IBM has on the high-tech market. "You won't get fired for buying IBM, yada, yada, yada, etc." This week he manages to at least start his column by talking about Google and its vision for universal search. Extrapolating on this at bit, does this make Google the next big ECM player? No, they have no BPM, so it's probably wise that vendors like Documentum, FileNet, and Hyland have worked hard on beefing up their BPM capabilities, but stil,l companies like Open Text and ZyLab were built on searching for unstructured information, and it appears Google could eventually marginalize that technology. So far Google has made all the right moves, maybe they will eventually have something better than SharePoint.

As for IBM, it's interesting that Cringely rips their internal technology, as they are like the largest technology servies provider in the world. "It is possible to manage big organizations, but you have to have good processes and good management systems," Cringely says before ripping into IBM. "Process and management systems?" Does anyone find it ironic that Gartner just rated IBM as the leader in ECM marketshare at 24.1%-ahead of Open Text (17.5%) and Documentum (14.3%). What's that old saying about eating your own dog food, or is IBM's dog food the tainted stuff?

Best regards,
Ralph

Lason Update- Monroe sentenced

It appears the former Chairman and CEO has gotten his come-uppance as well. As to the matter of this $20 million in restitution, where does that come from and who does it go to?

Microsoft Yahoo!

Unless there's something here I don't see, I don't understand how Microsoft and Yahoo! getting together will pose a threat to Google! Putting together two also-rans (alright, maybe the number-two and three players) to take on the leader in a developing market just doesn't seem like a good idea. It almost reminds me of the Time-Warner/AOL thing. Two losers don't necessarily make a winner.
Also, here's a link to podcast of a roundtable on e-discovery that I participated in at the recent AIIM Conference in Boston. It's interesting for its diversity of opinions on the topic. Obviously, this is very much an emerging market, in which the rules and directions are still being determined. You also had a good mix of editors, lawyers, and consultants on the panel.

IKON numbers, etc.

IKON just posted some impressive second-quarter numbers. From my standpoint, the most impressive statement is that their Professional Services revenue grew 28%, which indicates impressive gains in the ECM/complex document management system front. It's been a long time coming for IKON, but they really appear to be making (slowly, but, they're a big company and big things move slowly, but powerfully) from a copier dealer to a VAR.

Captaris appears to be picking off a competitor/further cementing its status as the market leader in the fax server world.

Here's something about Microsoft's Longhorn Server. I can't make hide nor hair of it, but originally I thought Longhorn as to be the DM market killer.

SharePoint WCM

At AIIM, we heard SharePoint get dogged for its RM capabilities. In this press release (see below as there wasn't a like just text), CMS Watch slams its WCM capabilties. I guess there was bound to be some backlash after everyone was touting these wonderful ECM capabilties in SharePoint 2007. For the record, we still think it is going to be a force in the market, much moreso than SharePoint 2003, but it is not the be all and end all for ECM companies as we know them, as many feared.

CMS WATCH FINDS SHAREPOINT ILL-SUITED FOR
TRADITIONAL WEB PUBLISHING SCENARIOS
11th Edition of "The Web CMS Report" Critically Evaluates
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
Silver Spring, MD, USA -- The latest semi-annual release of "The Web CMS Report" takes a close look at Microsoft Office SharePoint Server ("MOSS") 2007 and finds that, whatever its strengths in collaborative document management, the platform remains ill-suited for managing many traditional websites.
The Report was published by CMS Watch (www.cmswatch.com), an independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies and strategies for prospective solutions buyers.
MOSS 2007 is the successor to SharePoint Portal Server 2003 as well as Microsoft Content Management Server, Redmond's former Web Content Management product, which has since been sunset by Microsoft.
"SharePoint has always been a good platform for managing Office documents and the new version is even better at that," said CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne, "but managing web content represents a very different challenge, and here, Microsoft has not hit the mark."
Research findings include:
- Like most portal software, MOSS natively generates non-standard HTML code with extraneous JavaScript and table-based layouts, which is problematic for enterprises wanting to employ standards-based design and code conventions. Licensees must pro-actively strip this extra code from their own websites.
- By default, MOSS 2007 employs a folder-based navigation structure that must be re-coded or replaced by optional controls for more traditional website navigation schemes.
- MOSS lacks strong native support for translation workflows, limiting its effectiveness out of the box for multinational web publishing efforts.
- For public-facing websites, the product lists for USD 41,000 per server, making it one of the most expensive licenses in its mid-market class.
- On the plus side, MOSS 2007 can be heavily customized and extended using traditional .NET approaches.
"MOSS 2007 might make sense for certain document-heavy Intranets," Byrne added, "but prospective customers should not assume that its ease of deployment for simple file sharing will equate to ease of implementation for managing complex web publishing operations -- for Web Content Management, MOSS is really more of a development platform."
Based on hundreds of interviews with web content management system (CMS) customers worldwide, the 11th Edition of the Web CMS Report includes detailed comparisons of 30 vendors across 18 key feature categories, as well as evaluations of individual product suitability for 12 universal CMS scenarios.
Vendors covered in the Web CMS Report include Microsoft, EMCDocumentum, Interwoven, Vignette, Oracle / Stellent, IBM, Open Text / RedDot, WebSideStory, Day, Mediasurface, Serena, Tridion, CoreMedia, Percussion, FatWire, PaperThin, Ektron, CrownPeak, Alfresco, Typo3, Drupal, and Plone. The Report is available for purchase online from CMS Watch (http://www.cmswatch.com).
The Report is designed to help enterprises make faster and better buying decisions. Like all CMS Watch offerings, The CMS Report does not rank "best" vendors, but instead details the strengths and weaknesses of the various suppliers, identifies their suitability for different use cases, and isolates vendor tendencies that may influence longterm product roadmaps.

Millennium Group

The subject of these patent trolls came up the other day, so I decided to do a Google search on them. Here's what I found. Apparently, their activities aren't restricted to the document imaging/forms processing industry. Although, I'm not sure what they mean by latches and fasteners - is that supposed to be forms processing?

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