News You Can Use

Since the core of our business is newsletter publishing, we’d thought we’d give you a quick update on some recent news in the document imaging industry that could affect your business. News has been very fertile in this industry over the past two-three months with the coming and going of the AIIM show, as well as vendors’ annual spring conferences. Here are 10 of the top stories we’ve observed:

1.) Microsoft releases SharePoint 2007: We gave this complete coverage a couple issues ago (http://www.documentimagingreport.com/Microsoft_AIIM_2007.1573.0.html). Basically, SharePoint 2007 is a desktop ECM system that offers a great gateway to departmental and enterprise solutions. Get familiar with the product because it’s going to come up in conversations with your customers. If you can make it something you leverage, rather than something you compete with, you’ll be doing yourself a great service.

2) Capture space is in transition: This is nothing new, it’s actually been occurring since the late 1990s when we started with DIR, and the data and document capture markets were merging. Well, that merge is complete, and now we’re seeing some sort of merger between distributed and centralized capture. That means digital copiers are melding into the same market as dedicated document scanners—and the bottom line is that users just want to scan all their paper in the easiest and most effective means possible without worrying about different types of software for different types of capture. This is also leading to capture being slowly subsumed into the ECM space, because, in reality, people just want to capture all their information, not just paper, and get it under control—hence the term “enterprise content management.”

3) Kofax announces brand restructuring (http://www.kofax.com/company/press_releases_details.asp?id=478): See bullet number 2 for the significance of this.

4) Google announces open source OCR (http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/): This was kind of cool, even though the code base they’re working with is like 20 years old. Google really appears to be dedicating some serious resources to developing this stuff. Chris Riley of capture consultant Artsyl Technologies had this take on the potential impact of the project. “The real threat to the commercial OCR market could come from independent developers who decide to take the engine and run with it. The technology’s true power could be unleashed when it is set into motion for a niche type of processing, and fine-tuned to do it well. An example of this could be ID card reading, or OCR of numbers and mathematic equations….The engine under initial testing is not viable for a production-level environment. It is, however, one of a limited number of Linux engines, and, even in the enterprise, Linux is becoming more common because of security and stability advantages. I suspect we will see many talented developers take the engine to higher levels with some impressive results, but I don’t think Google itself, or any other large commercial development pool, will take this engine to market sooner than the next two years.”

5) High-end, niche scanners debut at AIIM 2007: New workgroup and departmental scanners were all the rage at the past two AIIM shows, but this year, we saw very little in that area. Instead, the most impressive hardware was at the other end of the market. BancTec introduced its new IntelliScan XDS (eXtreme Document Scanner) series with speeds up to 550 ppm, while Scan-Optics increased the speed of its SO Series from 240 ppm to 300 ppm. We also saw Böwe Bell & Howell (BBH) Scanners become the first document scanner vendor to enter the wide-format market. Yes, digital copiers and workgroup scanning is now the sexy part of the market, but high-end centralized capture is far from dead. Russell Hunt, president of BBH Scanners described growth in the high-end like this, “We definitely see the North American market for higher-end scanners as flat, however, we are seeing significant growth outside the U.S.” This is consistent with feedback we’ve been receiving about opportunities in less developed countries without the infrastructure to support distributed capture. That’s not to say centralized capture in the U.S. is dead. Remember, as more people get into document imaging, there’s room for growth up and down the hardware chain. Related to this, very high-volume market leader IBML just announced a distribution agreement with Cranel, which will make IBML products more accessible to VARs (http://www.documentimagingreport.com/Cranel-IBML.1589.0.html). BBH Scanners’ Infinity WF (wide format) will also be available through distributors, giving VARs an opportunity to address the trend of users wanting to combine engineering/manufacturing documents in the same ECM systems as their regular documents.

6) SAP signs OEM agreement with Open Text (http://www.documentimagingreport.com/SAP_Open_Text.1578.0.html): This is related to the last point, because SAP has always been big in manufacturing and claims to already have suitable technology for handling engineering drawings. The Open Text software is designed to help SAP better handle regular-sized documents. Of course, it also helps SAP compete better in financial services applications, where it is now going head-to-head with Oracle, which bought Stellent last year. The bottom line is that SAP is officially in the ECM game now.

7) Captaris is looking to further penetrate distributed capture space: As the market leader in fax server technology, Captaris claims to capture more documents than the traditional document capture leaders combined. Captaris is now looking to do more with those documents, such as classify and/or extract data from them, either through partnerships with existing capture vendors or by introducing its own technology. It’s been Captaris’ contention that fax is far from dead, and they have the numbers to back it up. As long as there is an install base of millions of fax machines, RightFax remains an intriguing wildcard in the document capture market.

8) Adobe releases PDF to AIIM for ISO standardization: This is going to have enormous impact down the road, after PDF has been ratified as an ISO standard. AIIM (the trade organization) has already spearheaded the ratification of PDF/A for long-term document storage. Once the baseline PDF is certified by ISO, it should help this popular, easy-to-use file format become the de facto archiving standard….as well as help Adobe fend off a challenge from Microsoft and XPS and keep its Adobe Acrobat business thriving.

9) Kodak increases focus on distributed capture channel: Kodak has long been a sleeping giant when it comes to scanner sales below the $10,000 price point. Over the past few years, they have improved their technology in this area considerably and recently brought on board a sales team that understands how to move distributed scanning hardware. Before it’s all said and done, Kodak will make some significant noise in the workgroup, departmental, and low-volume production segments of the market.

10) Invoice processing continues to take off – The first killer app for IDR (intelligent document recognition) technology continues to thrive. We recently received a press release from Brainware touting an installation with electricity producer Southern Company for processing millions of invoice documents per year. This seemed to us a large number, but Brainware executives assured us that they have more than one larger account and that most of their customers are doing line items! Dicom recently announced a worldwide reseller agreement with Finnish financial systems specialist BasWare for its Ascent Xtrata Pro invoice capture product. BasWare has an install base of some 500,000 customers. Top Image Systems and AnyDoc also recently announced significant invoice processing wins, while INVOICES continues to be ReadSoft’ top selling product line. Imaging invoices, even without applying OCR/ICR has always had a substantial ROI, but with the evolution of IDR technology, AP departments have become a slam dunk for imaging applications.