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

Mirror Imaging Patents

Not exactly sure what this is all about, but it appears two banks have settled with this Michigan-based company regarding the use of patented technology used to retrieve document images in financial environments. Reading the abstract for the patent it appears to be for some sort of hierarchical storage management that enables older documents to be stored on outside storage and accessed directly from there.

McMahan Leaving Kodak

Word has trickled down to us that as part of the recent management changes at Kodak Document Imaging, which were made on the heels of the closing of the Bowe Bell + Howell Scanners acquisition, Don McMahan will be leaving the company. McMahan had been Kodak's VP of sales and regional business manager, for Kodak's Document Imaging business in the U.S. and Canada. As part of the the recent re-organization, for BBH Scanners president Russell Hunt was named regional business manager. We understand that the VP of sales duties will be assumed by personnel already onboard.

McMahan has been a fixture in the document scanner industry since I began in the mid-late 1990s. He is known for his reseller focus and has previously help VP positions at Fujitsu Computer Products of America and Visioneer. He is also a past chairman of the AIIM Board and this year was named an AIIM Fellow.

HSBC redaction issues

Apparently the U.S. arm of international banking conglomerate HSBC had some problems with its redaction software. The bank recently announced it would be upgrading its capture app after at least one person complained that certain elements in their bankruptcy filing, which were supposed to be kept private, were made accessible to the public. We've written about weak redaction software practices in the past, which enable users to cut and paste the redacted material and have it show up in something like a word-processing file. (There was an embarrassing DoD incident a few years back). There is plenty of redaction software out there that can prevent this from happening, but apparently not everyone reads DIR. HSBC could have saved themselves a lot of money.

Apparently, the TSA made a similar screw-up recently as well.

AIIM 2010 Keynote Speaker Announced

Michael Rogers has been announced as the keynote speaker for next year's AIIM event. It seems after a fairly rough show last year, Questex is putting on the full court marketing press to generate interest in this year's event. It will be interesting to see who shows up. From my perspective, at least, Rogers sounds like an interesting speaker. He's listed as "Futurist-in-Residence for The New York Times Company, as well an interactive media pioneer, novelist and journalist. He also writes the popular Practical Futurist column for MSNBC. In addition, Rogers is a best-selling novelist whose fiction explores the human impact of technology."

Questex is also apparently offering educational passes for half of what they sold for last year. Hopefully, they can breathe some new life into the show. As the recent Microsoft SharePoint 2009 event showed, people will still show up in droves at trade shows if they are interested enough.

AIIM 2010 is scheduled to run April 19 through Thursday, April 22, 2010, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia.

Another Big Deal in the MFP World

We're talking about the M&A activity that has taken place in this sector over the past couple years. It now appears that Canon is buying Oce in a deal that is being valued at approximately $1.1 billion. Canon has been under pressure since a buying spree by Ricoh recently culminated in Ricoh acquiring Canon's primary North American reseller partner IKON. Of course, a year earlier, Xerox had picked up another large Canon reseller, in Florida-based Global Imaging Systems.

Not that Oce equates with buying a dealer channel, but Oce does have its own sales force and channel, which will be subsumed into Canon. On the document capture front this deal probably means very little, although Oce does have some digital mailroom products and services it offers its customers. Oce was the former home of the CGK OCR technology, before it sold it to Captaris a couple years ago, as part of its efforts to concentrate further on the output market. Oce, of course, then turned around and developed/licensed new document capture technology to address the digital mailroom. Anyhow, at least Canon was able to buy someone, and Oce does have some pretty good stuff in its portfolio.

Ralph

Kofax releases Q1 statement

Kofax has released a statement regarding its fiscal first-quarter  (ended Sept. 30) numbers that sounds fairly positive to us. Apparently the distribution business continues to struggle but the software numbers seem acceptable. Here's CEO Reynolds Bish's statement:

"I’m pleased to report that we made good progress and performed better than expected in our software business this past quarter. Market conditions have stabilized and show early signs of improving to a limited extent but continue to be challenging and difficult to predict. As a result and excluding the effect of the 170 Systems acquisition, which should contribute approximately $22m of revenues after acquisition accounting, we continue to expect low to mid single digit organic revenue growth in our software business this financial year.”

Upcoming industry events

Here's a few we just posted on our Web site.

Let me know if there are anymore you'd like me to post.

Ralph

Questex Marketing AIIM Show

Questex, which recently filed for bankruptcy, has "has reduced the 2010 Conference registration fees by nearly 50%. The event is scheduled to run April 20-22 next spring in Philadelphia.

SharePoint Conference continued

Had to chance to attend a session yesterday given by the KnowledgeLake CTO and another KLake developer. They discussed some of the details behind SharePoint's improved document management features. A lot of scalability and search issues have certainly been addressed, as well as some records management stuff.We'll get into details in our newsletter, but suffice to say that with a few tools added on SharePoint can do a better job of image management than it historically has. Of course there is still no viewer and we're not sure the out-of-the-box workflow is quite there....

The session I presented on Imaging-enabling MOSS was a bit disappointing in the attendance. Of course, they moved the room following all eCopy's marketing efforts...anyhow, it sounds like some people are just starting to do basic document image and retrieval - at least our panel members from Nike and Arizona State were, but I still haven't seen much high-volume transaction content management in SharePoint.

Live From SharePoint Conference

This place is really alive. It's a nice change from most recent conference/exhibitions that I've been to. Instead of people complaining about how dead the event it, I'm seeing plenty of busy vendors here. I just sat through a full presentation in the Laserfiche booth - so the interest in imaging is obviously. I'm interested to see what sort of attendance I get at my panel presentation on image-enabling SharePoint in another hour or so.

The crowd is mostly an IT crowd, a lot of SharePoint integrators, both in-house and external contractors. The general consensus, granted, it's a fairly biased crowd, is that traditional ECM ISVs better embrace SharePoint or die. As expected SharePoint 2010 has plenty of document management upgrades. Apparently, even though 2007 represented a significant upgrade over past versions, it was still fairly short as Microsoft corporate VP Jeff Teper said the company tried to make as many improvements as possible based on the 20 document/content management suggestions it got.

This includes upgrades in areas like scabability, search, records management, workflow, and a few other areas.

More later.