Adobe Acquires ECM Specialist Day Software

Adobe has announced plans to acquire Swiss ECM specialist Day Software for $240 million. I covered Day when it was a start-up back in 2002 (see story on page 6), At the time, Day was marketing something called a ContentBus and here's what we said: "The ContentBus,which is designed to apply a single set of content management controls to the multitude of data and document repositories that presumably exist within large companies. 'The goal of most ECM vendors is to get their customers to move all their content into a single repository. We offer all the benefits of content integration without the heavy lifting it takes to move the content,' said Day's VP of markering. Day boasts of 110 customers worldwide, mostly in Germany and Switzerland. It’s North American customers include the consumer electronics division of Sony and sportscaster Jim Rome’s Web site."

Day was also high on integrating multiple content repositories through the JSR (Java Specification Request) standards.

Quite frankly, I hadn't heard much about them until Adobe announced its acquisition, which seems to be for something like 5 times revenue. Day reported revenue of approximately $25 million for its last, which represents 47% growth.

Day has apparently found its niche, as here's what the Wall Street Journal article has to say:

"Day Software's products help companies manage the unstructured content–including files containing animation, video, photos or text–that are used to power company websites.


"The software also helps with social media by managing content gathered from external sources, such as customer reviews or blog postings. For example, companies can use the software to trigger a business response to content gathered from Twitter or Facebook.

"Day Software counts General Motors Co., McDonald's Corp. and Intercontinental Hotels Group as its clients. Within the last quarter, Day Software signed a host of new clients, including BMW AG and Hyatt Hotels Corp., said Day Software Chief Executive Erik Hansen in the interview. The company, which has seen licensing revenue grow at least 70% in each of the past four quarters, has doubled its sales and marketing presence in the U.S. over the past nine months, Hansen added.

Check Fraud Scheme Utilizes Images

I guess it it had to happen sooner or later. We spend a lot of time touting the security of electronic document technologies over paper, but now it appears that Russian hackers have broken into major check image repositories and used the images and associdated data to create some $9 million in couterfeit checks. I guess this isn't the first time there have been security breaches associated with document imaging. I remember a few years back there was a redaction screw up with some secure DoD documents, but this one is way bigger in scope. It also leverages modern print technology, which is very closely tied to the imaging market.

Remember a few years back when Frank Abignale- the guy the movie Catch Me if you Can spoke at a TAWPI event? Frank is now an expert in preventing check fraud. I'd be interested to hear his opinions on the latest generation of check scammers and what we can do to stop them. eWeek seems to suggest throwing more technology at the problem, which makes sense, as long as the good guys can keep moving faster than the bad guys.

Ralph

Atalasoft Reports Strong Growth

We also need to give props to MA-based ISV AtalaSoft, which recently reported 56% growth for the second quarter. AtalaSoft has some great zero-footprint imaging tools and also has launched a growing SharePoint viewer business. It recently hired industry vet Paul Yantus to help manage and accelerate its growth.

This last three blog posts tell us the imaging industry is bounding back nicely over the first half of the year and especially in the last three months.

Lexmark reports strong quarter

Lexmark had an extremely profitable quarter. "For its second quarter, Lexmark said it earned $85 million, or $1.07 a share, on $1.03 billion in revenue, compared with a profit of $17 million, or 22 cents a share, on sales of almost $905 million in the same period a year ago."

Now, Lexmark only acquired document imaging ISV Perceptive in May, so we're not certain how much this contributed to the strong quarter, ended June 30, but it is a good sign that Lexmark's business plan seems to be working....and Perceptive is certainly part of that business plan.

According to press release: "Lexmark said its results were spurred on by strong sales of printing hardware and supplies, as well as managed-print services for business customers." In the MFP world, document imaging seems to fall fairly close to the MPS initiatives, so, as I said, this is a good sign for Perceptive and our market I think.

Kofax Reports Strong Software Sales

Just back from vacation, and it appears not a minute too soon, as the news reports have been rolling in. Yesterday, you probably saw that Kofax announced a strong second-half and 2010 fiscal year for software sales - saying year-end results will between $213 and $215 million. This represents over 25% growth from fiscal 2009, when Kofax reported $169 million in software sales. That's a gross growth of some $45 million, at least half of which was organic. Kofax did acquire 170 Systems in Sept. 2009, and based on 170s trailing revenue of $28 million, maybe $20 million in growth can be attributed to that acquisition, but even a $25 million increase in software sales is quite impressive.

Kofax's hardware distribution business did decline from fiscal 2009, but only slightly, as it's projected to come in at $125 to $127 million, down from $129 million. Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish has always cited the hardware business as low-margin but profitable, and in the wake of the shortfall he seems to be cutting costs to maintain that profitability, as Kofax announced it will be eliminating 20 hardware redundancies (jobs?) to improve efficiencies.

Kofax clearly faces challenges related to its hardware business, but if it can keep growing the software business at 25% annually, the hardware business will continue to become a smaller and smaller percentage of overall revenue and eventually investors will stop paying attention to it.

Perhaps in answer to some of its hardware challenges, Kofax has announced that it will now be reselling IBML scanners in EMEA. If you remember, Bish had a lot of success reselling IBMLs when he was with Captiva. In fact, I believe at one point Captiva was IBML's leading reseller.

KnowledgeLake Honored by Microsoft

For the second straight year, St. Louis-based document imaging ISV has been honored by Microsoft in its Information Worker Solutions, Enterprise Content Management Partner of the Year category. For 2010, KnowledgeLake was named a finalist, after winninng the award last year. This year's winner was a company called Content and Code, out of the U.K., which seems to specialize in EDM and intranet solutions. KnoweldgeLake was one of three finalists.

KnoweldgeLake Partner and ECM/imaging roll-up, Global 360 was named the Visio Partner of the Year.

IKON to Resell Kofax Front Office Server

Digital copier/MFP dealer IKON has added Kofax's Front-Office Server to its product list. IKON, which has sold scanning solutions around its MFPs for several years, also carries capture products from vendors like Nuance eCopy, EFI, and NSi. Front Office server can run as an embedded application on multiple Ricoh devices. Of course, Ricoh now owns IKON..


IKON also sells solutions built around dedicated scanners and lists Kofax Capture in its product portfolio, as well.

Global 360 Marketing Itself

With two BPM acquisitions still fresh in most people's memories Global 360 is pushing its growth in BPM revenue very hard. The Dallas-based ISV, which began life as a roll-up primarily of document imaging vendors, including Eastman Software, Kofile, Keyfile, ViewStar, and Identitech, recently reported a 49% growth in software in BPM software licenses for its first quarter, year-over-year. Recently announced AnyDoc partner Appian  announced 59% growth for its 2009 fiscal year. So the BPM market is hot.

 Also, at the end of 2009-beginning of 2010, two significant BPM acquisitions were announced -  IBM's buy of Lombardi and Progress Software buying Savvion. Speculation has been that Microsoft may acquire Global 360, which would likely be a happy day for Global 360's investors, based on the some of the multiple's floating around the BPM market. Global's recent partnership with KnolwedgeLake does nothing to dampen that speculation.

Bottom line is that BPM is a curious space to be in, with both ECM and capture vendors seeming to gravitate toward it. The longtime theory has always been, it's not capturing content and putting in a repository that is important - it's what you do with that captured and stored content - meaning it's how you automate the process that brings the ROI, and this is where BPM comes into play. FileNet realized this almost from the outset of its business and many other imaging vendors followed suit. I guess it's about time the content management and capture people made the same discovery.

Laserfiche-Microsoft Complete DoD 5015 Testing

Document Imaging/ECM ISV Laserfiche has teamed with Microsoft to put together a records management solution that was recently tested by the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JOTC). The JOTC is in charge of the  DoD 5015.2 standard that is applied to RM solutions. The certification is typically mandated when doing business with the federal government, as well as state and local governments. Private entities have also been known to consider it.

If you remember, earlier this year, it was revealed that SharePoint 2010, which contains vastly improved RM capabilities, did not have all the right functionality required to achieve DoD 5015.2 certification. As a result, Microsoft began looking for partners to go through JOTC testing with. Laserfiche, whose software has been 5015 certified since 2003, was the first Microsoft partner to complete testing, which was done this week. The certification announcement should be upcoming.

PBMS to Resell Omtool

Thought this was an interesting announcement. Pitney Bowes Management Services (PBMS) is $1.2 billion entity that services large mailrooms.What they are going to do with a distributed capture product like Omtool's software, I'm not sure, but will try and find out.

Pitney Bowes, Inc. (PBI) also recently named a new a president of PBMS. Vicki O'Meara had formerly been an EVP  and the chief legal and compliance officer for PBI. O'Meara does have some operations experience from her 10 years at Ryder System, where she last served as president of the company's $2 billion U.S. Supply Chain Solutions division.

So, if you're following PBI has appointed a lawyer as president of PBMS and signed a deal with Omtool, which specializes in servicing the legal market. Sounds like some sort of strategic direction.

Paradigm Announces ISIS driver for Wide-Format Scanner

EMC's Pixel Translations continues to do a great job populating the market with ISIS drivers. Paradigm Imaging is the latest scanner vendor to announce a device with an ISIS driver. What makes Paradigm's Ci40 unique, at least according to the release, is the fact that is has an ISIS driver. Of course, I recalled that Colortrac made a similar announcement a few months back. So, I'm not sure if there are one or two large format scanners out there with ISIS drivers, but either way, it shows that Pixel has done a good job pushing its scanning technology into new markets and helping push forward the concept of enterprise capture.

SharePoint 2011 Conference Set

The Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 dates have been set. The event will held Oct. 3-6 in Anaheim. This is approximately two years after the very successful 2009 event, where SharePoint 2010 was previewed. 2010 is the version designed to be more scalable and manageable for document imaging applications.

Interestingly, in the promotional e-mail for the conference, Microsoft advertises SharePoint 2010 as "the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and Internet. "Learn how to apply the latest best practices for building and deploying solutions on the platform and find out how customers and partners are embracing cloud-based services to create value for their organizations."

So, for now, at least, it doesn't sound like anything new will be introduced. But, knowing Microsoft I would expect that to change.

Ralph 

InCab Scanning Suit

Over the past 10 years, the transportation industry has steadily increased its adoption of document scanning, and has been one of the leaders in the adoption of distributed capture. The latest trend seems to be the push for mobile scanning  - whether it be through dedicated sheetfed scanners attached to laptops or through utilizing the the cameras on SmartPhones. If you remember, we recently did a story on ACS Xerox, which is promoting applications in both these areas.

It was recentlly brought to our attention, however, the Wilmington, OH-based shipping specialist R&L Carriers believes it has a patent on capturing bills of lading with mobile scanners while in transit. The patent number is 6,401,078, and it was filed in 2000 and granted in 2002. It's entitled, "Bill of lading transmission and processing system for less than a load carriers"

Claims include:

"A method for transferring shipping documentation data for a package from a transporting vehicle to a remote processing center: placing a package on the transporting vehicle; using a portable document scanner to scan an image of the documentation data for the package, said image including shipping details of the package; providing a portable image processor capable of wirelessly transferring the image from the transporting vehicle; wirelessly sending the image to a remote processing center; receiving the image at said remote processing center; and prior to the package being removed from the transporting vehicle, utilizing said documentation data at said remote processing center to prepare a loading manifest which includes said package for further transport of the package on another transporting vehicle."

and "The method of claim 1, wherein the image sending step is accomplished from onboard the transporting vehicle."

Apparently, R&L has filed suit against multiple parties, including ACS, DriverTech, Pegasus Transtech, Qualcomm, Intermec, and PeopleNet. Sounds like a interesting case.

Atalasoft Hires Ex-Captaris EVP Yantus

Massachusetts-based ISV Atalasoft has hired Paul Yantus as its president. Yantus, a former EVP at Captaris, is being brought in to help the company manage its growth and its push deeper into the SharePoint space. Atalasoft founder Bill Bither will remain as CEO.

Atalasoft was founded as a developer of .NET-based imaging tools and made a name for itself with its zero-footprint viewing capabilities. A couple years ago, it launched a zero-footprint viewer targeted at SharePoint applications. Yantus has been charged with growing this business.

When he was at Captaris, Yantus spearheaded the company's acquisition of the Oce Document Technologies, an OCR/ICR and document capture specialist. After the acquisition Captaris announced ambitious plans to leverage this technology to attack the SharePoint market, previewing several products at AIIM 2008. However, at the end of the year, Captaris was acquired by Open Text, which put the SharePoint efforts way on the backburner. Open Text has focused on leveraging the ODT technology in invoice capture apps for SAP and other ERP systems.

It looks like Yantus is being given a second chance to attack the SharePoint space with imaging technology. In a conversation with him earlier today he talked about bringing ECM capabilities to the SharePoint space. More on this strategy in our next premium issue.

A Brief Look at the SAP-EMC Agreement

This announcement coming out of SAPPHIRE last week, the big SAP show, is interesting not only because of who is involved, but who is not. I guess I had been assuming that Open Text was SAP's preferred ECM and transactional content processing (TCP) partner, but this new agreement proves that is not necessarily the case.

The resseller agreement between SAP and EMC is right in the heart of the TCP space as it focuses on processes like insurance broker statement and mortgage loan processing. This is classic document imaging and workflow stuff. With its Captiva, Documentum, and even throw in Document Sciences, acquisitions, EMC certainly has the technology stack to handle this. Open Text, which picked some great capture technology with Captaris, and has some other imaging-centric stuff, must not have stacked up as well. Or, maybe, SAP just wanted to hedge its bets in the ECM space, or a combination of both.

That's not to say SAP and EMC doesn't make a good partnership. They are certainly large and well-respected names in the banking and insurance industries, which is being targeted through this new level of partnership.

Our initial take on Lexmark's acquisition of Perceptive

By now, you've likely heard the news on printer vendor Lexmark  by Perceptive Software for $280 million in cash. At first glance, this seemed like a pretty high price, but, as Perceptive's revenue was $84 million last year, on growth of 20%, it really represents a gross price of three and one-third times revenue, which is similar to what Hyland Software, probably Perceptive's closest competitor, was priced at when a majority stake was sold to the equity investment firm Thoma Cressey Bravo in 2007. FileNet received a similar multiple from IBM in 2006.

The acquisition is another case of a hardware vendor using its cash reserves to diversify into the higher margin software business. Dicom buying Kofax is probably the most famous example of this in our industry, but Cornerstone buying Pixel Translations, which became InputAccel, is another successful example. Even EMC buying Documentum kind of represents this. Of course, there have been failures, like Scan-Optics buying Southern Computer.

More analysis on this acquisition in our premium newsletter, but we will make one comment: Lexmark is headquarterd in Lexington and Perceptive near Kansas City, so there shouldn't be a huge culture shock, which is good.

Quality Associates, Inc. Event

Hanging out QAI's annual event in Annapolis, MD. Beautiful day out here and looking forward to some afternoon sailing. But first have to get through a panel discussion. We've got reps from Iron Mountain, Microsoft, Fujitsu, as well as the City of Washington, D.C. (industry veteran Mark Mandel) on the panel (with me moderating), so it could be fun.

QAI is a large reseller and service bureau in the Beltway area. They have a small vendor exhibit area with companies like Kofax, Psigen, A2ia, AvePoint, Atalasoft, and NSi - as well as several hardware vendors, all exhibiting. QAI also has an imaging-for-SharePoint focused subsidiary, DocPoint Solutions, headed by former Fujitsu sales exec Bob Dickerson.

Two interesting notes from Peggy Winton's (of AIIM) keynote on Web 2.0:
1. From an AIIM survey: 40% of those surveyed still use paper for collaboration - my view on this is that there is plenty of opportunity for scanning these docs into SharePoint - which everyone says is a great collaborative app
2. Winton quote: "E-mail is not a collaborative environment anymore. It's too slow."

Kofax Names New CMO

 I guess we all should have seen this one coming. Not that Andrew Pery didn't do a good job, but his hiring pre-dated Reynolds Bish being brought in as CEO. Over the past couple years, Bish has been pretty thorough about bringing in his own people, especially to fill high level positions like this one. New CMO Martyn Christian never worked with Bish at Captiva, but they did spend time together on the AIIM board, back when Reynolds orchestrated the sale of the trade show to Advanstar - a great move for the trade organization and one which was followed shortly thereafter by Bish's tremendous run of success at Captiva. Plus, Christian has history with IBM and FileNet - of course, IBM bought FileNet - two very important Kofax partners.

It seems like the changing of the guard at Kofax is practically complete.

Upcoming E-Discovery Webinar

I have been asked to be part of an upcoming Webinar entitled:

E-Discovery, Retention & Records Management

• There will be three presenters:
• Scott Rosenberg, CEO, Miro Consulting
• Brad Harris, Director of Legal Products, Zapproved
  
• Myself

My role will be to discuss the synergies between ECM and E-Discovery: an crossover that I think is thoroughly underexploited by our industry. Tune in for more:

WHEN: Tuesday, May 18, 2010

 1:00 PM - 1:45 PM EDT (10:00 AM – 10:45 AM PDT)

WHERE: Click here to register or 

go to https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/132865962

Twitter:

Follow the webinar on Twitter: MiroConsulting (#Miro).

 

I.R.I.S. Mobile Scanner

If you read my premium edition of DIR last week, you probably saw my article asking why we don't have a  mobile scanner driven by mobile phones? Well, I got an e-mail from I.R.I.S. the other day talking about its IRIScan Anywhere device for capturing documents in the field. It's a mobile scanner that doesn't need to be driven by anything. You can save images to the device and upload them to a laptop/PC or save them to a USB. Here's a video. (Not sure where they got the pitchman.)

Someone suggested that this may be the answer to what I'm looking for, but I say no, for two reasons.
1. There is no way to preview the image-like you could with a SmartPhone- so you really don't know if you got a good image. And if you're scanning remotely, this could be a big deal. (Especially with the contract you just signed over dinner - per the example in the video.)
2. There is no possibility for immediate connection with third party applications, as the device is not online when scanning, or connected to a network like a Smart Phone would be. Sure, you could upload to your laptop/PC and go online afterward, but in a real-time business environment, I like the idea of a real time connection. 

TAWPI and IAPP Merge Staffs and Boards

Out the initial Fusion event here in Grapevine, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Seems to be going well so far. Somebody told me there were 1,600 people here, which is marked rise from the combined attendance of the two events last year. In other words, it seems like in this case, one plus one equals three.

I attended a few conference sessions today and the rooms were over half filled, with one almost full. This is a sharp contrast to last year's stand-alone TAWPI event, which had great presentations, but, from what I saw, not many more than 10 attendees in any sessions. And there have been some big name end users in the sessions like Travelocity, Tyco Electronics, Erie Insurance, and the Dallas School District.

While the majority of attendees are clearly from accounting departments, the sessions I attended were mostly about imaging, so there has been a nice crossover. It's good to see TAWPI find this direction and IAPP's users seems eager to embrace the TAWPI technologies both in A/P and A/R - as these two spaces come together.

The timing really seems right for vendors like J&B Software, for example, which is announcing a combined A/P and A/R platform at the show.

The combination of the events is working so well, in fact, that IAPP and TAWPI have decided to combine boards and staffs. Next year's event has been scheduled for Orlando, during the same time of year.

Iron Mountain Asks CMS to Consider Scanning

Paper storage giant Iron Mountain has come up with an interesting pitch to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Basically, they seem to be asking the CMS to more heavily consider the benefits of scanning when defining "meaningful use," which is the criteria for receiving reimbursements for electronic medical records (EMR) implementations.

This is interesting because at the Laserfiche user conference I attended earlier this year, an SI who services the medical market indicated that document imaging was not really an important criteria for meaningful use and thus had gone with another ISV, instead of Laserfiche, for its EMR requirements. Iron Mountain is, of course, motivated by the fact that it "manages hardcopy and digital healthcare information for more than 2,000 hospitals across 43 states" and has a growing document scanning business. Nonetheless, this type of lobbying could be a good thing for our entire industry, which is one reason its nice to now have $3 billion companies like Iron Mountain participating in our space.

Kofax Names New CFO

Kofax has named a new CFO. I'll offer a few thoughts on this:
1. Kofax originally appointed a North American-based CFO in 2008, before announcing the following month that Stefan Gaiser, who resides in Germany, would retain the position after all. CEO Reynolds Bish, has, of course, moved the headquarters of the company from Europe to Irvine, CA, so a Southern, CA-based CFO makes sense. While the new CFO, Jamie Arnold, doesn't appear to have been based in SoCo with his former two employers, Nuance (which is in MA) and Informix (which was in Silicon Valley), he's a lot closer to getting to Irvine that Gaiser was. Gaiser, who has been with Kofax since 2000, will stay on until the end of the year.
2. Arnold's last job listed in the press release was with Nuance, where he was CFO through a number of acquisitions. Could his hiring mean that Kofax, which constantly rumored to be an acquisition target, is actually planning to become a more aggressive acquirer?
3. Of course, turning that on its ear, Arnold also worked for  Informix from 1997-2003, a business that was eventually acquired by IBM. And, IBM has been a long-rumored suitor of Kofax.

Read into all that what you will. The only certainty seems to be that Kofax now has a North American-based CFO. Oh yes, and yesterday, it announced the largest software licensing deal in the history of the company: $4.4 million deal, $3.8 million in software.

Visioneer releases new Strobe

One of the most popular pieces of hardware at the recent AIIM show was the mobile document scanner.   These types of devices were showcased by multiple vendors including HP, Cannon, and Plustek. Visioneer, of course, pioneered the market for sheetfed mobile devices with its Strobe line, which has been on the market since at least the mid-to-late 1990s when I came into the market. (I will have a longer feature on the mobile document scanning market in my next issue of DIR).

This post is just to note that Visioneer has released the latest version of its Strobe, the 400. It lists for $299 and can perform duplex scans at a rated speed of 6 seconds per page. It offers color output, as well as VRS for producing higher quality bi-tonal images.

Oh yeah, and here's a neat side benefit: “While we may never become truly paperless, we believe you can have a ‘less paper’ office,” said John Capurso, vice president of marketing at Visioneer. “The Strobe 400 is a great, low cost solution for anyone looking to reduce the amount of paper in their life and Visioneer will plant a tree on behalf of every customer who registers a new scanner through our partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation.”

Enterprise Capture White Paper

This was written by JD Hicks is President of Imagine Solutions, and it's a fairly insightful paper on the advantages of distributed capture in the financial service market. Hicks' view seems to the that the advantages of centralized capture are already proven, but that financial services organizations shouldn't be afraid to push their advantage, so to speak, and see how they can optimize their scanning processes by moving them outward - closer to the customer/point of origin.

One of his last lines is “Nothing happens until a document gets captured" - a parody of an old sales adage, which makes a lot of sense, when you consider that you can't really begin an electronic workflow until you have electronic documents and data. Overall the paper is a good read that raises some valid points that financial institutions should consider. (Hicks also presents them, justifiably so, as principles that any organization can consider.)

Kofax releases Interim results

From the press announcement: 

Reynolds C. Bish, Chief Executive Officer, commented: “I’m pleased to report that we made good progress and performed better than expected in our software business this past quarter. Our execution and market conditions in this business continue to slowly improve and, as a result, for the financial year ending June 30, 2010 we now cautiously expect high single digit growth in revenues on an organic and constant currencies basis with substantially greater growth on an as reported basis due to the 170 Systems acquisition. We continue to expect a low single digit decline in our hardware business revenues for the year.”

Sounds like the Bish plan, after some fairly complex restructurings, is starting to move forward. Of course, the goal of his plan has always been to increase shareholder value and Kofax's stock is currently trading at its highest level since he was brought in late 2007.

Questex Reports 24,000 People Showed Up at AIIM On Demand 2010

I have no idea, how they do their math, but these are the numbers they came up with. Now, it used to be I could get a detailed report of how many were vendors, attendees, press/analysts, etc. but I haven't seen that for a few years. So, the general consensus seemed to be that the majority of the crowds were on the On Demand side this year. What for, I don't know, as vendors like Ricoh, Sharp and Toshiba didn't even show up - and Ricoh, in fact, had its own event in Vegas simultaneously. But, assuming those observations are correct, we're talking clearly less than 10,000 for the AIIM event, although the combined show floor was so small, I don't see how an attendee couldn't have made it to both events.

That all said, the Questex release clearly has some positive exhibitor quotes in it, and I definitely heard a lot less complaining than last year. My theory is that all the malcontents (and I'm not saying their malcontention wasn't well founded) pulled out. And everyone there this year pretty much got what they expected, as the show didn't seem considerably worse than last year, and maybe even a little better, if you account for the fact that many Europeans were delayed or deterred because of the volcanic ash in the skies over Iceland.

I thought Chris Riley had a great quote about the event (it's included in the Questex press release): "I would be lost without my once a year pow-wow with industry peers.  This year at AIIM, the attendance, to me at least, did not seem to take the normal steps downward. I believe this was because of some positive sentiments surfacing about economic recovery and [rising interest in] Microsoft [SharePoint]." (I think that's what he meant to say at least. I didn't quite understand the phrasing in the release.)

By the way, Chris is now with ShareSquared, which apparently specializes in image-enabling SharePoint, and from that standpoint, it was probably a good event. The Microsoft SharePoint lab looked fairly busy and Bob Bueltmann, of Microsoft imaging partner KnowledgeLake, seemed very happy with his investment in the event.

Finally, next year's AIIM On Demand event has been scheduled for March 22-24 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in D.C. I think everyone agreed that Philly was beat, and it was time to move on. Thankfully, we're not heading back to Boston (nothing against the city, but we were just there and fresher markets are better, I think). D.C., of course, also has the built-in federal government market. Interestingly, AIIM got the dates that FOSE, the big government technology show, had this year. FOSE 2011 has been pushed back to July. So, that seems like nice coincidence (or planning) to help get people out who are used to going to FOSE in the spring.

The only thing I don't like (aside from the possible prices for D.C. hotels) is the MFP dealer event ITEX being co-located with AIIM and On Demand in D.C. Dealer events are almost always held in Vegas, and there's reasons for that. It will be interesting to see how many dealers show up in D.C. Perhaps it would have been better to hold off a year on the co-lo and move AIIM to Vegas in 2012, as people have certainly been clammering for a more western venue.

Ralph

iPhone Document Scanner

Have you seen it yet? I think if there's a market for that type of device, which lists for like $45, you'd think ACS might be able to mass market their clipboard with the phone holder that they introduced for truckers.

CVision Introduces SuperFast OCR

CVision, a Queens, NY-based document capture software developer, with some serious roots in JBIG 2 and compression technology, showed its new SuperFast OCR technology at last week's AIIM show in Philadelphia. The feature will initially be included in CVision's PDFCompressor flagship application for creating optimally compressed PDF files from images. Traditionally, CVision has licensed Nuance's OCR technology to make the PDFs full-text searchable. CVision will still utilize Nuance's OCR, but its the pre-processing which makes CVision's OCR so special.

From what I understand, CVision is able to convert recognized characters into symbols, which greatly accelerates the OCR process, especially on multi-page documents. The demo I saw processed 400 pages in 18 seconds, or an average of 22 pages per second. CEO Ari Gross told me CVision has tested the technology to deliver 10 pages per second per core processor. "With a quad-core processors, we can hit 40 pages per second," he said. Average OCR rates, from what I understand, are at least several seconds per page.

So, where does SuperFast OCR make the most sense? According to Gross, it's as an embedded feature on MFPs and scanners. Gross says it creates the potential for "real-time" OCR on these devices. In other words, as fast as the device outputs pages, it would be able to OCR them. Gross is gauging interest on embedding CVision's technology.

We recently wrote a story about Konica Minolta embedding ABBYY's OCR technology in its MFPs. However, Dean Tang, president of ABBYY USA, indicated that for users capturing and apply OCR to multi-page documents, it would probably be more efficient to apply the technology offline in a post-scan process. CVision's technology, which is in beta and will be released as part of PDFCompressor in a few weeks, could potentially eliminate the need to run a separate OCR process.

AIIM 2010 follow-up

Made it back from AIIM in once piece, once again carrying a wealth of new information on the ECM/document imaging market. No attendance at this year's show was no better than last year, but at least we all knew what to expect. Most of the vendors who complained about low attendance last year, didn't exhibit this year, so there was a lot less negative feedback. The only problem this year was the volcanic ash that limited European attendance, but no one blamed that on Questex. And most everyone was at least somewhat excited about the move to D.C. last year. I will say this much for Philly, it's a pretty cheap date, it's easy to get around, and there's a fair number of good bars and restaurants...which all made a great place for another year of document-imaging related networking. That said, the venue was getting a little stale and it's probably a good time for a change.

I think I described this year's show to somebody as 3-D Linked-In or something....

I'll have more AIIM follow-up later.

Early AIIM Report

Apparently the volcanic ash is still delaying some flights out of Europe. A couple of German vendors I was supposed to meet with are unable to make the show. Talked with the show's PR rep earlier, however, who indicated that a lot of people, including keynote speaker Whitney Tidmarh of EMC, did make it in.

Well, there's always something I guess. The weather here in Philly is beautiful, but the volcanic ash may be limiting the European participation. More from AIIM as the week progresses.

Reseller QAI Adds PSIGEN Capture

 We've been running into Irvine, CA-based capture ISV PSIGEN more and more recently. PSIGEN, which specializes in batch capture and has some advanced indexing for ECM capabilities, recently announced a partnership with Maryland-based VAR and service bureau Quality Associates, Inc (QAI).

QAI Director Scott Swidersky e-mailed us that he is very impressed with the PSIGEN technology and expects some big things to come out of the relationship. QAI is also a Kofax reseller, so it will be interesting to see which product gets more traction among QAI's customer base going forward. Swidersky is also a principal in QAI subsidiary DocPoint, which focuses on imaging for SharePoint solutions, and Psigen has a fairly healthy capture for SharePoint practice, but the current partnership does not mention DocPoint.

Datacap's Capture Portal

Check out Scott Blau's new white paper on a "universal capture portal." (I couldn't get it to display all the way in Firefox, but it worked fine in IE). It makes a lot of good points about the next generation of the digital mailroom, a topic we have covered here before. However, whereas previously, we came at it from the perspective of a traditional mailroom outsourcing provider (Oce Business Services), Datacap (which Blau founded) is coming at it from the perspective of a capture software vendor. Datacap pretty much wants to capture everything, from paper to any type of e-mail and process them through similar workflows. While I love the concept, I'm not sure converting everything to TIFF files for data capture, which seems to be what is suggested, is the answer. Basically, by converting to TIFF, you are taking a smart file, like an Office document, making it dumb, and then applying OCR to make it smart again. Not sure that's the most efficient way to go about it....Nonetheless, it's a very good white paper that presents some interesting ideas and challenges current workflows, which often involve printing e-mails and then scanning them - which is an even "dumber" way to go about converting files to usable data.

Former Visioneer Exec John Dexter Joins Consulting Firm

John Dexter, who was most recently VP of business development for Visioneer, has joined his former Visioneer boss Murray Dennis at SCNNX. Targeted at companies selling or using document imaging technology, according to a press release, "SCNNX was formed to provide document imaging consulting services in the areas of strategic planning, competitive analysis, product development, channel development, strategic alliances, executive recruitment and vendor sourcing."

At Visioneer, Dexter oversaw a lot of the partnerships surrounding Visioneer's OneTouch technology. We're not sure when Dexter left Visioneer, but it was relatively recent. Our last conversation with Visioneer seemed to indicate that while the company was enjoying a significant amount of success through its relationship with Xerox, its efforts at building a traditional document imaging reseller channel had been put aside in favor of focusing on the Xerox relationship. And the OneTouch technology, while certainly useful to Xerox, clearly had broader appeal to more traditional resellers. Dexter is certainly familiar with the traditional reseller channel from his days with Fujitsu Computer Products of America prior to joining Visioneer.

At SCNNX, Dexter "will be responsible for advising companies in document imaging product
strategies, strategic alliances and enterprise-wide implementation initiatives." Dennis, who was CEO of Visioneer when Dexter joined in 2007, is Chairman of the Board for SCNNX. Dennis left Visioneer in 2008. Dennis is also now the president and CEO of iVina, which markets desktop and mobile scanners.

AccuSoft Pegasus to Debut Mobile Viewer

At the upcoming AIIM show, being held April 20-22 in Philadelphia, AccuSoft Pegasus will be showing new mobile viewing technology. It sounds like the imaging SDK specialist will be showing a prototype, or a proof-of-concept, of the technology, which is being aimed at Applie iPhone apps. Its "primary focus is...providing portable access to documents stored on a server. It targets the Safari browser for viewing of TIFF, PDF, and JPEG files."
"Features include paging, zoom, pan, rotation, thumbnails, access to file information, annotation viewing, and a magnifying glass. These features are activated by familiar iPhone gestures such as tap, flick, pinch, and touch-and-hold. File information currently includes file type, resolution, file size, and compression type."

"The demo illustrates usage of ImageGear v17 for mobile viewing, and offers a sneak peak of new annotation functionality coming soon in the ImageGear .NET SDK."

In other recent news:

Kofax landed an $800,000 deal with an Australian health insurance company doing capture, classification, and data extraction from forms.

Also, Tangent Systems has launched a new version of its Deposit 21 software. This version is specifically designed to be integrated with forms processing applications. It's basically designed to add check capture and Check 21 functionality to document capture applications.

Hyland and PFU Introduce ECM Kiosk

Hyland Software, developers of the OnBase ECM suite and PFU, a subsidiary of Fujitsu have come up with a self-service kiosk to enable access to document managed in OnBase in customer service applications. There's a couple of video links at the bottom of the page. The one I watched on healthcare showed the kiosk being used in a doctor's office. Think of self-check-in at the airport. Similar application. Except that in addition to checking in, you can also complete forms and make payments (I guess you can make payments at the airport too.)

Cool thing is that Hyland's OnBase workflow can probably be used to route the forms when they're completed and also provide you with access to a whole assortment of documents that you have rights or a need to see. Hyland also has all sorts of HIPAA controls that it can set up around this. There are also government and higher education versions of the kiosk as well.

PFU is a leader in the kiosk market in other parts of the world.. Hyland actually has a great deal of experience working with another Fujitsu subsidiary, scanner vendor Fujitsu Computer Products of America. They have done an embedded integration involving a Fujitsu network scanner. This would seem to build on that.

Microsoft SharePoint gets a lot of credit for bringing ECM to the masses, but this kiosk is a great way to bring ECM use, at least, to the masses. And with touchscreens getting ever more popular thanks to cell phones and now the red-hot sales of the iPad, the time for ECM access through kiosks has probably come.

Health Insurance Communcations Study

Pitney Bowes recently released a results of a study discussing communications between health insurance companies and their customers. It seems, believe it or not, that most people, even though they have e-mail accounts, prefer paper EOB (explanation of benefit) forms. Clearly, some education and/or marketing efforts need to be implemented if insurance companies want to take better advantage of technology like electronic statement presentment - really kind of a form of COLD/ERM (electronic report management).

Computhink Integrates with Muratec MFPs

Continuing with our theme about imaging-centric ECM systems in the SMB becoming more prevalent because of their increasing and tighter connections with MFPs, SMB-focused document and image management vendor Computhink has announced an integration with Muratec's MFPs. Neither is really a leader in the their space, but both have been around for awhile, presumably have decent install bases, and these are the types of integrations that we are really seeing gain traction.

It used to be all about MFP capture, now it's starting to be more about MFP ECM. Of course, this may have something to do with the overall. trend of capture and ECM converging.

Kofax Signs Large A/P Deal

You have to think this is what the Irvine, CA-based document capture, and now business process automation vendor had in mind when it acquired 170 Systems last year. Today's announcement represents an $800,000 deal that includes Kofax invoice capture technology as well as 170 systems BPA and SAP integration.

DocuWare Reports Strong U.S. Growth - MFP Channel Strong

German ISV DocuWare, which now does about half its business in the Americas, recently reported another strong year, including 14% growth from its U.S. based subsidiary, DocuWare Corp. DocuWare Corp. was one of the first ECM vendors to recognize the potential of digital copier dealers and is now benefiting from its early investments in that channel. I was just working on a story on another ISV focused on the MFP channel, Square 9 Softworks, that told me it grew like 150% last year. Granted, Square 9 is a lot smaller than DocuWare, but my point is imaging/ECM sales through the MFP channel seemed to be a bit bullet proof last year, despite the recession.

BancTec Builds on Enterprise Capture Platform

BancTec, the Dallas-based high-volume document capture specialist, has introduced some upgrades to its CenterVision Enterprise Capture platform. I did a fairly comprehensive white paper on this product that you can find on the CenterVision Website site under "Related Documents." BancTec recently announced an implementation of CenterVision with the Public Works and Government Services Canada for processing "approximately 6 million paper, fax and electronic documents per year for the country’s federal employee pension plan, Superannuation Pension Transition and Client Services." (see press release).

CenterVision can act a dashboard for managing high-volume and distributed document and data capture operations. I'm assuming the product maintains its open architecture for working with other vendors' data capture products, but BancTec has also introduced some more of its own data capture capabilities into the platform- specifically for invoice processing and better key entry. It has also introduced some better controls for tracking incoming mail.

Kodak Software Announcements

Nothing too significant, but Kodak has honored its partner BCS Systems for an integration it has done with Kodak's Scan Station network scanner. We're not sure who BCS is, but they apparently develop something called iConnect, which would appear to be competitive with network scanning software products from vendors like eCopy (now owned by Nuance) and Notable Solutions (Nsi), which also has partnership with Kodak surrounding the Scan Station. From the release, the only iConnect back-end integration we gather that is currently available is SharePoint, which, of course, isn't a bad place to start.

Also, Kodak announced a free module for connecting its Capture Pro software with the FileBound document management system. The focus seems to be on the SaaS version of FileBound, which makes sense. When uses purchase a scanner and some capture software like Capture Pro along with it, a SaaS DM integration offers them an easy, low-effort/cost start-up destination for the files they are capturing. So, it gives them the chance to start utilizing capture without making a big ECM investment at the same time.

Correction to H1N1 Case study

One of the reasons I posted this case study is because I thought it was pretty neat that somebody was using unconstrained handwriting recognition in a successful forms processing app. It turns out this is not the case. The service bureau sent me a copy of the forms they are processing, and they do indeed include boxes for letters.

Turns out there was some sort of miscommunication/minunderstanding with the vendor that wrote the case study. Apparently, while A2iA's FieldReader does have the ability to read unconstrained handwriting, it's not being used in this app. Nonetheless, it's probably impressive that leveraging FieldReader's constrained text capabilities, the integrator, QAI, out of Maryland, has achieved something like 80% productivity improvements.

Kofax Desktop 2.0 includes OCR functionaltiy & TRIM 7 Review Link

Not sure whose technology Kofax has licensed, but it has added to the ability to create full-text searchable and more compressed PDFs in its $50 Desktop capture product.

Also, here's a link to a story by Australian document management publication Image & Data Manager that discusses some of the upgrades to HP's TRIM, version 7, which we mentioned a couple posts ago.

Square 9 Softworks Releases New Version of Dealer-Targeted App

 Square 9 Software, a CT-based ISV that spun off of document-imaging-centric reseller InfiNet Systems, has released a new version of its SmartSearch application. We first featured SmartSearch in our publication about a year go. The thing I like about the product, which is basically a document imaging repository, is that it is specifically priced to fit within the leasing models that MFP dealers use when selling hardware. The new version includes more advanced workflow capabilties.

HP Launching TRIM 7.0

In recent months, we've heard a little more surrounding the TRIM Software line that HP acquired with Australian ISV Tower last year. We did a story on an Atlanta-based consultancy that specializes in document management for property and casualty insurance providers that has added TRIM to its product portfolio. We also recently were sent a story about a Malaysian TRIM reseller and ISV, VersaPAC, that develops a Web-client for the product, improving its viewing component. Stephen Kucia, International Sales and Marketing Director of VersaPAC, informed us that HP is currently showing version 7.0 of TRIM at a users event in Australia.


According to the HP Web site, the new version is scheduled to launch by the end of this month.

Some News Updates From the Past Week.

Been a little slow on the blog posts, as I've been working on other things, and it's been a bit slow for earth-shattering news, but there have been several interesting stories that have moved in our industry.

Here's a peek at a few of them:

• Oce Business Services has opened a new document conversion service bureau facility in Salt Lake City. We're supposed to talk tomorrow to get some more details for an article in next week's issue of DIR, but we do know that it's set up to run 24/7 and handle up to 10 million pages per month. Also, one of the services being offered is invoice capture. This comes on the heels on a Digital Mail service OBS has launched for its mailroom customers.  Ironically, digital mailroom and invoice capture were two of the specialties of the Document Technologies business that Oce sold to Captaris in late 2007, which was later bought by Open Text.
• Including maintenance and professional services Kofax signed a $2.7 million deal with a U.K.-based public health services organization.  "The organization, an existing customer, will use additional Kofax software to capture, extract and perfect data from hundreds of millions of medical forms and related documents received annually. The resulting data will then be exported to the organization’s mainstream data processing applications for adjudication and payment." So, it sounds like an insurance application to us.
• Open Text has launched some mobile ECM stuff. This makes perfect sense, as everyone seems to be now using their Smart Phones for everything - especially the up and coming generation. I think Open Text is taking the right approach in the release when it suggests that smart phones are taking the place of laptops. One of the applications being addressed is invoice processing, which I assume means the approval process - a concept originally introduced by Cardiff. It's something Mark Seamans showed to me a couple years back. Made sense, but was a little ahead of its time then, especially coming from Cardiff, which I'm not sure had the install base to support that feature. Open Text, through its SAP partnership, certainly has some Global 2000 organizations that could take advantage of it.
• Finally, Maryland-based service bureau and SI QAI got together with recognition engine specialist A2iA to come up with a capture application for reading cursive on H1N1 forms. Here's the case study.

That's all for now.

Ralph

InfoTrends Releases Document Outsourcing Forecast

The Questex-owned analyst firm InfoTrends has issued a new Document Outsourcing Forecast for 2008 – 2013. The press release about the new report, predicts a rebound in the market as the economy rebounds.

Alex Sumarta, a Director at InfoTrends, had this to say about the expanding breadth of services we have observed BPO vendors in the market offering, "Existing and new players are responding to the shifting demands of the market by offering an expanded services portfolio that increasingly addresses the entire document lifecycle, as well as other related business communications services beyond print. More importantly, these service providers are becoming process owners and value chain managers.” 

Corrections to Kofax Financials Post

Just got off the phone with Kofax Chief Marketing Officer Andrew Pery who confirmed that I had credited 170 Systems with accounting for way too much software revenue in a previous post. As a result, it turns out that Kofax's software sales for the first six months of its fiscal 2010 (the final six months of calendar 2009), which does not, by the way include maintenance revenue, were more impressive than I gave them credit for, which is good news. Pery indicated that the bump in services revenue was also related to the increased number of large deals Kofax sold in the six-month period, which come with relatively large first-year maintenance agreements. Not to mention that it turns out that a much higher percentage of the 170 Systems' revenue than I originally thought is accounted for as services rather than software....Also, the reason I was talking to Pery was because of Kofax's recent announcement that it had signed on with a new investment bank as its broker. Pery explained that this was primarily a formality relating to the bankruptcy of its previous bank, which was based in Iceland - a country that is having some major bankruptcy issues. I'll have some more details in tomorrow's DIR, but here's a link to an Orange County Business Journal article that does a pretty good job explaining things.

Hyland Buys SaaS Developer for Healthcare Providers

Hyland Software made its second healthcare-related acquisition within the past year. The Cleveland-area based ISV has acquired eWebHealth, which offers a variety of hosted medical records solutions. According to the press release, "eWebHealth delivers workflow solutions by a SaaS model for clinical, administrative and financial environments. It also automates specialty areas such as physician coding, signature completion and compliance. Nearly 100 small and mid-size hospitals and healthcare facilities located across the country are eWebHealth customers."

 So, it's not a huge acquisition, but seems to be incremental to Hyland's business. Remember, Hyland has been focusing on the healthcare marketing a lot longer than most document imaging/ECM vendors, many of whom have come to the table late hoping to take advantage of demand driven by Federal stimulus rewards for electronic medical record implementations. Hyland also has had a viable SaaS offering for several years, an area of its business which reportedly continues to grow rapidly. So, this adds technology and expertise in both those areas and should help Hyland round out its healthcare provider offering even further, and versatility is already one of its differentiating factors in that space.

When the majority of Hyland was acquired a few years back by an investment firm, the company promised to become more acquisitive. Of course, then the economic downturn hit and private equity investors were one of the hardest hit groups. Nonetheless, Hyland has made some smalller, but strategic acquisitions like this one that should keep it on a growth path and help it continue to fill in gaps in the ECM market that are not as well addressed by larger competitors like IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Oracle and Open Text.

Lexmark Heathcare forms tech

This is kind of a cool application that enables healthcare organizations to store forms and reports on the drives in their MFPs in case their healthcare information systems go down. It also can store bar coded cover sheets for patient record capture.

ACS Xerox Launches Mobile Phone Capture Systems

Based on the all the buzz, some of which I've helped generated, having to do with capturing documents on mobile devices, I thought this was an interesting announcement from ACS - now owned by Xerox. It involves a capture system that leverages a mobile phone and some sort of specialized clipboard for capturing document images in the trucking industry. ACS is already a leader in this vertical market, and I believe it already offers solutions driven by both mobile scanners and scanners at truck stops. So, this will be another option. It will be interesting to see how quickly it catches on.

ACS, of course, is a long-time leader in the adoption of imaging technologies as part of its BPO business. I also got a couple of imaging-related news releases from Xerox today, in conjunction with their exhibition at the HIMSS show. It will be interesting to see if some of ACS' imaging expertise cross over to its parent company, which has some imaging technology - but hasn't historically been as cutting edge as ACS.

Millennium L.P. Carrires On

If you are one of the many people in the document imaging industry who has unwillingly donated to Dr. Mitch Medina's Kenyan missions, you shouldn't feel alone. According to a recent report by the group PatentFreedom, Millennium has been one of the busiest non-practicing entities (NPEs) pursuing patent suits over the past five years. In total Millennium has sued 110 companies with more than 90% coming since 2003.

Millennium, as many of you know, has some patents that seem to be related to automated forms processing. Although there has been a lot of talk about trying to stop them, eventually everyone seems to settle because the terms are made so agreeable. And Medina, who is apparently back in good standing with the Kenyan government after being exiled a couple years ago, marches on. For 2009, I found suits filed suit against SpringCM, A2iA, and eCopy.

Part of the settlement used to be that the defendant couldn't talk about it and had to name some competitors or other vendors to go after. Don't know if that's still the case, but, after a big year in 2005, Millennium seems to have settled down to going after a handful of companies per year. Not all its suits involved imaging, as according to the site "Patent Prospector," Medina has 17 U.S. patents, including one for retrieving dog poop (5,403,050). How apropos."

Ralph

Accelerated I/O Update

Over the years, I've done some articles and briefings with a Colorado-based compression specialist called Accelerated I/O. I really thought they had some neat technology for compressing document images, which they planned to eventually leverage in audio and video applications. It was at least five years ago that I started talking them, however, and from what I can tell, they still don't have a shipping product.

Well, their story apparently sounded good to many other people as well, and the company has been able to raise more than $3 million in funding. However, that not having a product thing can get you into trouble with sed investors.

I know I've introduced several people to this company and I hope I haven't led them toward any investments they regret. I also hope that company principal Joe Doll's claim. "We never intended to do anything wrong.We were engineers who may not have known all the rules," is true.

I asked a couple of compression engineering experts to take a look at this technology and it never really went anywhere. Also, I find Accelerated's expectations regarding their opportunity in the document imaging market to be highly unrealistic - even moreso as the market has matured since the first I talked with them, but their expectations have not. Do I think they are a fraudulent operation? I never had that impression, but I guess you never know. Do I hope their technology is as great as they tout it to be? Certainly, because, if it ever does work, it could do some great things, but I'm still not sure about their business plan of starting in this industry.

That's all I have to say about Acceleated I/O for now. Does anybody else have an opinion/thought and Joe Doll and his proposition of compression through "continuous mathematical equations?".

Iron Mountain Buys Mimosa for $112 Million

We've been touting the potential of e-discovery in the Document Imaging Report for at least the last year. Well, Iron Mountain's acquisition of Mimosa would seem to validate some of our hype. After all, it paid $112 million for a company with 2009 revenue of $20.6 million and expenses of more than $30 million. So, Iron Mountain basically paid more than five times revenue for a company losing some serious money.

That said, it does give the $3 billion paper giant another stake in the digital world. Mimosa is best known for its e-mail archiving business, although it apparently offers some e-discovery tools as well - a natural extension in our opinion. While Iron Mountain has had technology in both these areas - it has primarily been of a hosted variety. Apparently, Iron Mountain felt it needed Mimosa's on-premise technology to complement its hosted options. 

Iron Mountain's biggest asset, of course, is it's install base. Recently, it has been focusing more and more on converting these paper customers to digital customers - with imaging part of the mix. Iron Mountain is an interesting company with a lot of advantages because of its size and market penetration. It will be interesting to see if it can make this large investment in electronic information technology pay off. We definitely think it has chosen a pertinent and valuable asset to acquire. Now, it will come down to execution.

Pixily Changes Name To Office Drop

Remember these guys? They offer that Netflix-send all your documents to them in an envelope, they scan, OCR them and make them all available on-line service. Well, it's a pretty cool service, but the name was a little vague, so they've done some surveys and stuff - I took one of them, and came up with Office Drop. I hope it works for them.

Brainware completes installlation with Sun Chemical

These are the types of deployments we hear about relatively often from Brainware, which is kind if a dark horse contender for large invoice capture applications. They don't quite have the same background as Kofax, ReadSoft, and Open Text, but seem to win their share of large implementations, often replacing competitive vendors' implementations. At Sun, they tout a Kofax replacement.

Here's a quote from the Director of Corporate Accounting at Sun Chemical that validates a lot of the stuff we hear directly from Brainware:

 “Brainware touted its ability to achieve 80-90% field extraction rates out of the box, but we realized that those were conservative estimates as we have experienced extraction rates as high as 93-99%,” said Ray Baer, Director of Corporate Accounting for Sun Chemical. “Once our team started to use the system, we quickly recognized how much more user-friendly it was compared with what was previously in place.”

Nuance Introduces Free PDF Reader

I just returned from a Nuance analyst conference in New York City. It was held at LDI Color Toolbox on Broadway, a very successful dealer that focuses on nationwide accounts. LDI also apparently sells a lot of eCopy, as eCopy hosted an analyst event there a couple years ago.

It's a great venue, but what was especially interesting to us was the Canon/eCopy message that Nuance was presenting. No, eCopy founder Ed Schmid was not there, although he is apparently still is a VP assisting with the transition, but Nuance Executive Robert Weideman talked extensively about the ShareScan and even the PaperWorks desktop products that were picked up when Nuance bought eCopy last year. Interestingly, Nuance's Paperport, definitely a more successful desktop product than PaperWorks to date, was hardly mentioned. It may just have been the crowd, as LDI is a Canon/eCopy dealer and Canon has some top execs on hand as well, but Nuance's voice recognition products got more play than their legacy imaging products. And Nuance certainly has some interesting ideas about integrating voice with imaging technology....

It's probably worth nothing that Ricoh, Xerox, and Nuance's Personalized Scanning Platform, which it kind of touted as an eCopy killer before the acquisition, were barely brought up. Well, Ricoh was brought up, but just as competition for Canon...More on all this in the first March newsletter.

One other thing, while the event was going on, Nuance introduced a free PDF reader to compete with Adobe's free reader. I'm mean, they're free, right, so what's the competition? Well, Nuance also introduced a PDF to Office conversion service available through the cloud to users of its PDF reader. It's also free, but eventually, I guess the plan is to charge for something. Weideman did note that Nuance is number two in the PDF conversion market behind Adobe (I assume he means revenues), and it at least seems to be cementing its position there.

New Scanners: Kodak Upgrades and Faster Front Office Scanning

Sorry if you read this earlier, before I completed it. I was in the Philly airport, heading to NYC for a Nuance analyst briefing, and had to board my plane. AT&T Internet access in Philly is a nice feature...anyhoo...

Kodak made three scanner upgrades announcements yesterday. Faster Trupers, a new entry-level LVP model - the i1405, and a network administration tool for its Scan Station 500s. The network admin tool is probably the coolest of the three announcements. Kodak held a conference call for press and analysts to discuss the news, and the IDC guy brought up an interesting question. Could the Kodak network management tool manage other MFPs. I thought Will Hebert of Kodak gave an interesting answer: "That was a bridge too far to cross for this release. It is certainly a possibility for the future.”


In other recent scanner news, both Fujitsu and Panasonic came out with new scanners that they touted as bringing more speed to the front-office. An interesting concept. I'm not sure the market is there yet, but heck, why not? People are certainly scanning more than ever. FCPA introduced its faster scanner yet, the 6800. Panasonic introduced a higher-level workgroup model, with a bigger ADF and a rated speed of 40 ppm/80 ipm.

ReadSoft and KnowledgeLake Announce Partnership

Two companies that have been fairly busy on the partnership front, have gotten together. Transactional content management (TCM)/imaging for SharePoint specialist KnowledgeLake has announced a partnership with invoice capture leader ReadSoft. Not sure of all the details yet, but it adds some serious invoice capture technology to KnowledgeLake's portfolio. KnowledgeLake recently announced a partnership with Global 360 that will beef up its BPM capabilities, so all the pieces are being put in place for SharePoint-based invoice processing applications. ReadSoft U.S., which recently formalized a reseller strategy after years of focusing primarily on direct sales (and with Kofax's increasing focus on direct sales, you might say they are attempting to seize an opportunity), has also recently done partnerships with Hyland Software and Altec.

Smart phone scanning

Speaking of smart phone capture, check out this short YouTube video on technology from Canadian forms management specialist Crawford Technologies. I'd explain it, but it's easier to just watch.

Ralph

Unisys Payment Processing Business Acquired and Changes Name

Not sure if these guys do much full-page document stuff anymore, but they definitely were big back in the day....

Also, here's Steve McNair's musings on the Google Goggles mobile recognition apps.

CeBit to host Green Hall

Tuesday, March 2–Saturday, March 6
Venue: Hannover Fairgrounds; Hannover, Germany
Website: www.cebit.com

 From a press release:
"Green IT (Hall 8)
CeBIT Green IT is comprised of three thematic areas, two that focus on business and one that spotlights the consumer market. "Smart Infrastructure" is dedicated to energy- and resource-conservation, with subcategories such as virtualization, cooling, server-based computing, and intelligent outsourcing. "Green IT meets Business" looks at how IT can sustain cost-cutting measures by optimizing processes and improving energy efficiency. Examples will include zero-watt screens, resourceconserving output devices, and user-friendly mobile devices. "Green IT @ Home" addresses energy conservation at home, using PCs, notebooks and screens as examples. CeBIT Green IT will also feature a forum with highcaliber speakers from industry, science and government. More information is available at www.cebit.de/greenit_e"

Analysis: I've been skeptical about how much greener a document imaging operation really makes an organization, because of all the computing power used to access documents, but when you combine imaging with some of the innovations mentioned here like "zero-watt screens," maybe we're onto something.
.

Kofax reports 6-months results

There is a lot of information in the release.

Here's the stuff I boiled down as important:

1. Overall software revenue increased by 17% to $101.5m compared to $86.7m in the prior year. Revenue on an organic and constant currencies basis increased 8%. Analysis: By our calculations, the September acquisition of 170 Systems, an approximately $7 million per quarter business, is being credit for about $8 million over four months, which, I'm guessing is pretty much what was expected.)
2.  Applications software license revenue increased 11% while services revenue continued its strong performance with growth of 29%. Analysis: This is less impressive, as based on our calculations, 170 Systems could have quite possibly accounted for $4 million in software licenses sales over the six-month period - meaning there could have been no organic growth in software license sales. Of course, Kofax is telling us that the 29% growth in service revenue, which is now accounts for 54% of application software revenue (compared to 46% for licenses), made up for this. I'm not sure how this jives with the scuttlebutt we've been hearing about Kofax increasing maintenance fees. Does anyone know if Kofax accounts for maintenance as licenses or services? Either way, services traditionally produce lower margins than licenses.
3. That said, even with a 15% increase in total expenses, almost all related to sales and marketing, Kofax did manage a 41% overall increase in the EBITDA for its software business, which checked in at a cool $8 million.
4. VRS sales were essentially flat; they are actually included with software sales and were about 12% of Kofax's $101.5 million in half-year software revenue.
5. The hardware business sucked, actually decreasing 1% in total revenue to $67 million and producing an adjusted EBITDA of just $2 million, after reporting a $5.6 million EBITDA for the previous year's six-month period. Analysis: Granted, I've never made $2 million in six months from my business, so I guess, $2 million is nothing to sneeze at, but comparing the profit and growth numbers of the VRS and hardware business to those of the software applications business, it's clear to me that a schism is going to have to take place for Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish to achieve the stock valuation he desires. Presumably dragged down by the hardware numbers, Kofax share value actually took a minor hit after the Interim report came out - even though the software numbers look pretty good.

Ralph

ACS cuts costs in Illinois child support payment ops

ACS continues to do very well in the area of processing child support payments. As we've said many times, ACS does a great job leveraging imaging/capture/OCR technology as part of a larger business process improvement initiative.

News of the Day

Kofax has released a new version of the MarkView BPM for invoices app it acquired last fall. MarkView 6.5 features tighter integration with the Kofax capture suite of products. It is also certified for both Oracle and SAP environments, a sign that Kofax is aggressively pursuing SAP accounts. MarkView's legacy has been primarily Oracle Financials.

Also, Cabinet NG, a Huntsville, AL-based ISV that targets that mid-market, has announced a Green Awards program that "will award SMBs who demonstrate the best use of document management to improve their bottom line and operate their businesses in a more environmentally friendly means." We're not totally sold on how much greener document imaging can make a company - after all I don't exactly think silicon-based electronic equipment is the cleanest machinery in the world, but it's interesting to see somebody trying to measure the effects of at least how much less paper is being used.

ZyLab Introduces New E-Discovery Application

“Approximately one percent of organizations are prepared for full-scale eDiscovery activities,” says Johannes Scholtes, Chief Strategy Officer for ZyLAB. “As a result, the vast majority of organizations facing litigation are forced into a costly reaction mode in order to respond to discovery requests within court-imposed timelines."

Scholtes makes this statement in a press release about the new capabilities in the ZyLAB eDiscovery & Production system.  ZyLab, which began life as a search vendor, and transitioned to document imaging, is now very focused on this legal/e-discovery market. In the press release, ZyLab breaks down how its product addresses the five areas of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) and how addressing these areas can benefit businesses. ZyLab has had some significant success in this market recently and checking out how it applies its product to EDRM could be very instructive to imaging VARs, end users, and vendors looking to succeed in what is burgeoning opporunity.

Another Six-Figure Deal for Kofax

Kofax, which has made a fairly well-publicized transition toward more direct sales, today announced another large, six-figure deal. This is one is for $600,000 with a "a major global financial services firm headquartered in the U.S." In a recent conversation with CMO Andrew Pery, he indicated the Irvine, CA-based ISV has increased its number of six figure deals 25-30% since going to a "hybrid sales model" from its former strategy as almost purely channel driven sales. Kofax's six month report is due out soon.

Fujitsu buys out PFU shareholders

This deal make Fujitsu 100% owner of its scanner manufacturing business.

LuraTech Launches Capture Workflow

LuraTech, a document imaging capture and compression specialist, has become the latest vendor to announce an enterprise capture platform. InputAccel, back in the day, was really the first one of these types of products, which involve plugging in pieces of capture software to handle different process. LuraTech has its own image processing and data capture software, but has also introduced an API for introducing third-party technology. Monitoring capabilities are also key in these types of environments. I'm not sure of all  the details, but other vendors' offerings I've seen in this area has brought the concept of GUI process design to capture. As we've written before, although this isn't exactly BPM, the concepts of capture and workflow continue to move close together.

Industry veteran's take on iTablet

Datacap founder Scott Blau introduced forms processing technology that last time Apple introduced a revolutionary tablet computer. Remember the Newton? This got me thinking about the EMR world, where doctor's are attempting to go paperless to get their share of the stimulus package. EMR applications are often connected to tablet computers.

A had a conversation with Hyland Software's healthcare manager who explained how document imaging can contribute to providers meeting "meaningful use" requirements and earning reimbursement. Basically, her view was that about 30% of medical records like EKG and lab reports, faxes from other offices, etc. comes in on paper and needs to be captured. Thus imaging technology is necessary to ensure full utilization of an EMR system, which contributes to meeting "meaningful use" requirements. 

Keys to SaaS success

Had an interesting conversation with Juergen Biffar, co-founder and technical guru at German imaging and DM specialist DocuWare the other day. His company has just committed $1 million Euros, in addition to its regular R&D budget, over two years to development of Web-based technologies. Half of this money is committed to SaaS development, which Biffar views as an important method of delivering software in the future. He is taking the attitude that SaaS competition is going to come from start-ups and other people, like Google even, who are not in the DM industry today.

He said one of DocuWare's board members commented that it has been said that it is impossible for a vendor of traditional software to make the successful transition to SaaS, to which Biffar replied that he plans to be part of the first one. Our discussion led to trying to come up with successful SaaS ventures aside from Salesforce.com. Of course, companies like Digitech and Filebound have had some success in our industry, and we recently talked with a Web-capture ISV, CAPSYS, that said about half its new sales are SaaS-oriented. Anyhow, going over my notes led me to a Google search on "SaaS success stories," which yielded this article detailing one analyst's ideas on why traditional software vendors have trouble succeeding at SaaS and what they need to do. I thought it might prove useful to some of my readers.

Happy trails.
Ralph

Kodak reports strong fourth quarter

That's the whole company at least, which "today reported fourth-quarter 2009 earnings from continuing operations of $430 million, or $1.36 per share, on sales of $2.582 billion." As for Document Imaging, "the
Net sales were flat, as volume declines were offset by favorable price/mix. Business process service volume declined, the effect of which was partially offset by sales stemming from the acquisition of the scanner division of Bowe, Bell & Howell in the third quarter of 2009.

It sounds like the BBH Scanners acquisition led to a greater number of sales of higher-volume scanners - which makes sense based on BBH's scanner line, which really helped Kodak DI in the fourth quarter.

As for the profitability for the whole company, it was driven by patent licensing to phone and camera manufacturers and drive the company's stock up almost 20%.

NSi Increases Distribution with Ricoh

MFP Capture specialist Notable Solutions, Inc. (NSi), has increased its distribution channels with Ricoh. According to Mike Morper, VP of marketing for NSi, Ricoh Americas and Ricoh Canada will now be reselling NSi's AutoStore 5 application. The focus will be secure DoD implementations. "Couple that with our continuing growth with IKON, AutoStore (DocAccel in the IKON world) is garnering a large top-of-mind awareness within the greater Ricoh North American community," said Morper. "A major milestone."

Iron Mountain Subsidiary buys Legal-focused Service Bureau

For its traditional business Iron Mountain has focused mainly on ramping up its document conversion services internally or leveraging partnerships. However, to better address the burgeoning e-discovery market, the paper storage giant's e-discovery subsidiary, Stratify, has acquired a litigation-support focused service bureau Legal Imaging Technologies. LIT, which has partnered with Iron Mountain for several years, is based on Mountain View, CA.

On a related note, Zylab, a search and imaging vendor that now focuses on e-discovery applications, recently published this new whitepaper that says "only about 1% of organizations are prepared for full-scale eDiscovery activities. As a result, the vast majority of organizations facing litigation are forced into a costly reaction mode in order to respond to discovery requests within court-imposed timelines."

Kofax Lands Huge Deal

$6.5 million worth of software and maintenance, as well as presumably installation services to a "global freight transport and services company."

Oce Introduces Digital Mailroom Solution

Oce Business Services, which currently provides physical mailroom services for close to 600 customers, has introduced a digitally-oriented service to compliment this line of business. Oce marketing executive Ted Ardelean described it as an effort to automate an areas of business that has been largely untouched by technology in recent years. Oce's offering is a service, not software, but it does utilize scanners and software. It involves scanning envelopes and scanning pages only when necessary. Aside from the fact that it will be done primarily at customer sites, instead of outsourcing stations, it is similar to the offering of Earth Class Mail. Of course, Oce has a customer base to start with an isn't a start-up, so it will likely be under less pressure to ramp up quickly in what, (despite some 10 years of talk about the Digital Mairloom) is still a relatively nascent market. 

Interestingly, it seems most reviews I've read of Earth Class Mail's services are actually positive, of course, until they apparently more than doubled their pricing, which totally pissed this guy off, to the point where he started a blog to diss ECM He does list a number of alternative mail digitization services. This is starting to seem like a sneaky, good market if you can do it with a reasonable cost structure.

SharePoint 2010 ECM Capabilities

Came across an interesting article/link to a blog post in today's issue of AIIM's on-line publication Infonomics. It's written by an ECM consultant who (going with an AIIM blog theme) earlier listed eight ECM requirements he wanted to see addressed with SharePoint 2010, and in this post he discusses how Microsoft addressed each of those requirements. His review, based on information he picked up during his attendance at October's Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009, which I also attended, is fairly favorable about the progress Microsoft is making toward providing ECM functionality. I came away from the event with a similar impression.

New Link to Distributed Capture Blog

Caught up today earlier with Greg Cooke, VP of sales and marketing for browser-based capture specialist CAPSYS, out of Colorado. Although just a two-year-old company, its product has apparently been around for awhile and it has some fairly large installs. The occasion for the meeting was to discuss a partnership with open source document management software development firm Knowledge Tree. As KnoweldgeTree is primarily a Web-based app, the partnership with CAPSYS makes sense and both applications can be deployed in an SaaS environment, which is interesting too. The reason for my post is to let you know that CAPSYS has a blog on Web-based capture that I've linked to from my blog.

2010 EMC Information Calendar