Visioneer awards

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

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

Capture news

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

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

Latest

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

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

RG

Records management

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

Salesforce.com marketplace

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

The case for e-mal management

Yet another amusing example of e-mail mismanagement.

Nuance JPEG

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

ACS "No Deal"

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

TiS Lands $2 million deal; ACS acquisition in jeopardy

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

Eight billion dollar ACS deal could be falling apart.

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

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

Latest news

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

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

ACS to be sold?

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

TIS Subsidiary Gaining Momentum

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

Layoffs at EMC

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

RG

Former Apprentice Contestent Touts Book Scanner

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

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

RG

DM Compliance

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

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

Holiday press releases

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

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

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

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

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

Top Image Systems nails another transporation deal.

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

Xmas thought

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

Captiva EMC Proxy

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

Open Source

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

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

RG

Web services

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

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

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

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

RG