Document Imaging Trends in 2007

'Tis the season. Yes, we realize it’s the Holiday season, and we wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and all that, and hope you and your families are well. It’s also the season for all the talking heads and pundits to make their predictions for 2007. Why should we be any different? Seriously, we realize we are in the unique position of being able to study that market form a 10,000-foot view, while many of you are busy day-to-day trying to make numbers and install and manage systems.

So, without further adieu, here are the Document Imaging Report’s top five trends to watch for in 2007:

1. SOA, SOA, and more SOA—As Paul Lord, CEO of Westbrook Technologies, put it, “Even if users aren’t ready to implement SOA, when it comes time to buy a document management system, they won’t buy one that doesn’t employ SOA.” Yes, service oriented architecture is the current buzzword sweeping our industry, and in 2006, the groundwork was laid for SOA infrastructures. Many of the leading document imaging vendors including Kofax, Captiva, Westbrook, and Datacap, introduced SOA-based applications. SOA is attractive to our industry for a number of reasons, most notably the increased flexibility and the integration potential it offers. Yes, the road to mainstream acceptance of document imaging is being laid with SOA.

2. IDR, it’s not just for invoices any more— It took awhile for invoice processing to move from the early adopter/visionary stages to mainstream adoption, but with the help of improved interfaces and integration with A/P data, invoice processing has become a cash cow for most vendors with intelligent document recognition technology. Now that the Chasm has been Crossed (excuse me for borrowing Geoffrey Moore’s terminology here), IDR vendors are in search of new applications. The nirvana of IDR is the digital mailroom—or as we like to call it, “scan ‘um all and let the software sort ‘um out.” The key to the success of IDR, however, appears to be integration with back-end data. And as capture technology is integrated with more diverse sources than just financials systems, we look for horizontal and vertical adoption of IDR to spread.

3. Globalization—India and China are often discussed as two of the fastest growing new markets for imaging software vendors. Yes, barriers limiting trade on the North American, European, and Asian axis seem to have fallen, and the document imaging industry is feeling its effects. Recent M&A activity created larger ECM players, which has made vendors more capable of spreading their wings worldwide. The world is indeed a smaller place, which potentially increases the size of your market, brings you into more competition, and provides you with more resources to leverage. You really have two choices, embrace globalization or be swept under by it.

4. Continued growth of distributed capture—We love to talk about living in a “now” society. Everybody wants everything yesterday. Well, scanning paper as soon as it enters an organization helps speed up business processes and gets people information faster and more accurately. As lower-end scanning hardware continues to improve, along with wide-area-network infrastructures and distributed capture software, there is less and less to prevent a tidal wave of distributed capture adoption. And don’t forget, many digital copier dealers are now almost giving away some impressive imaging capabilities.

5. DIR continues to rock—Okay, so this is a bit self-serving, but I can’t think of another macro-trend. We’ve been at this since 1998 and are absolutely the best source of news you can use on trends for converting paper processes to digital ones.

Hope you all have a happy and prosperous 2007!