Distributed Capture Opportunities Growing

Document imaging resellers looking to hit a home run are overlooking the lucrative Web-based capture market, according to Ken Peterka, CEO of capture software specialist Captovation. Captovation, one of the pioneers in the area of Web-based capture, is currently working on a deal that could be deployed over thousands of seats in the next two years. "The number of distributed capture deals we are landing isn't necessarily increasing exponentially, but their size certainly is," said Peterka.

According to Peterka, many resellers are ignoring the potential of distributed capture because they are used to selling traditional ECM (enterprise content management) systems. "For a typical imaging reseller, the largest software component of a sale is the ECM package, because of the number of seats it involves," said Peterka. "They look at capture as an add-on of a few seats to feed the ECM system. However, when you get into distributed installations, the capture component can involve hundreds of seats and reach six figures."

Peterka explained that the prospective customer he mentioned already has a large centralized scanning installation. "We’ve found that distributed capture isn’t necessarily cannibalizing centralized capture," he stressed. "Overall, end users are increasing the number of documents they are capturing for compliance and control. However, without a good Web-based capture application, they previously couldn’t justify shipping paper documents from their branches to a centralized site for scanning. The only catch for resellers is that in many of these opportunities, the end user may already have an ECM system."

Market demands catching up to feature set

According to Peterka, there are three main features that large distributed capture customer are looking for. "These are ease of use, ease of installation, and ease of administration," he said. "This is the message we have been preaching for five years, and it’s good to see it finally aligning with market requirements and being validated on a larger scale than ever before.

"When you’re deploying a capture application to thousands of users, it can’t be hard. Some of our competitors do a great job with batch capture, but their product design is overkill when you’re dealing with ad hoc users in a distributed environment. When you’re dealing with thousands of users, the capture process can’t be difficult."

Interestingly enough, Kofax is preaching the same message with its recently introduced distributed capture scanning appliance—the Document Scan Server (DSS). Kofax recently announced a DSS deployment with Randolph Brooks Federal Credit Union (RBFCU), a Texas-based organization that is listed as one of the top 10 credit unions in the United States. "Ease-of-use was very important to RBFCU," said Tom Olivieri, EVP, professional services, for Long Island-based Kofax reseller Digital Storage Solutions. "RBFCU wanted something simple. They didn’t even want users to push a button to initiate a scan. Because a DSS configuration enables a user to control a scanning process remotely over an Internet connection, it was the optimal solution."

Peterka concluded by saying the sun is shining for resellers who would like to make some hay selling distributed capture. "There is a window of opportunity that is open now," he said. "However, there are a limited number of large 100-plus seat deals out there, and as they are addressed, that window will close."

For more information: http://www.captovation.com; http://www.kofax.com/products/intelligentcapture/scanserver