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