E-Forms, IDR Pace Capture Market Growth
A few years back, we attended a conference where research firm Strategy Partners gave the keynote and labeled e-forms and IDR (intelligent document recognition) as the two rising stars in the data capture industry. Since, then, Harvey Spencer, who was then heading up Strategy Partners’ U.S. research, has started his own firm and eliminated e-forms from his coverage area. His recent numbers, however, support that contention that IDR is fastest growing segment of the document capture space.
According to Spencer, growth rates in the transactional or data-centric capture space, driven primarily by recently introduced IDR technology, will surpass growth rates in the batch capture space within the next four years. “From 2000-2005, the CAGR for the batch capture space was 20-25%,” Spencer told DIR. “However, my projections for 2006-2010 have its growth steadily dropping, from 21%, to 19%, to 18%, and so on. In the meantime, the transactional capture market, which grew only 7% in 2005, jumped to 11% growth for 2006. That was two percentage points higher than I had forecasted. I expect the transactional capture segment’s growth rate to continue to rise and to begin outpacing the batch capture segment in 2011. That’s only three-and-a-half years away.”
It’s these type of dynamics that have batch capture market leader Kofax gravitating toward the transactional space. In fact, the Invine, CA-based subsidiary of The Dicom Group, recently announced a bit of a reorg. designed to help it move more agressively into the transactional capture space. “We have made enormous progress in transactional capture, and it’s only prudent for us to redeploy our assets and resources to help us accelerate our growth in this rapidly growing segment,” said Andrew Pery, VP of marketing for Kofax. “This type of adjustment is the only way we can maintain our historical growth rate. We are very proud of the fact that we are king of the hill in batch capture. But that market has reached maturity, and no investment we can make is going to change that.”
From a partner perspective, Pery stresses there is no reason to worry. In fact, it seems to us that to maintain margins, partners would do well to follow Kofax’s lead and move more deeply in transactional capture. “None of our competitors can match our install base of Ascent Capture customers,” Pery said. “We are by no means removing our investment in the batch capture space. In fact, we are looking to go back to our batch capture customers and upsell them solutions around transactional capture.
“We have a well developed channel that can help us do this. This channel has the vertical expertise to deliver transactional solutions around specific processes. We want to invest more in co-marketing and be more visible with our partners going to market in this area.”
Spencer gave the example of invoices as one area where capture technology is evolving from a batch operation to a transactional one. “Historically, invoice capture has primarily been a batch application that relied on manual data indexing. Improvements in IDR have transitioned invoices to more of a transactional application.”
E-Forms Implementations On the Rise
Of course, we also recently profiled an e-invoicing specialist, OB10, that is attempting to get every supplier in the world to sign up for its network, so that buyers worldwide can receive electronic invoice data from their suppliers, thus expediting payments. When we spoke earlier this year, OB10 had succeeded in getting something like 160 buyers and some 30,000 suppliers signed up for its network. OB10’s VP of sales and marketing Peter Watson, estimated there were about 4,000 buyers in the U.S. alone, so OB10 still has some work to do before achieving world domination. However, there is no question that e-forms are more efficient than paper….
Which brings us to Cardiff Software. We’ve had a couple interesting conversations with Cardiff CEO Mark Seamans in the past couple months. This most recent one was also a conference call the included systems integrator ImageSource out of Olympia, WA. Ironically, ImageSource is a leading Kofax Ascent reseller (a product that competes with Cardiff’s TeleForm paper capture application), but recently has been seeing some traction with Cardiff’s LiquidOffice e-forms product.
“I think of our install base of 500 ECM customers, about 75% are potential e-forms users,” said Shad White, CTO of ImageSource. “E-forms are a good secondary or tertiary installation for customers that have already installed document imaging. These customers already realize the benefits of converting paper documents to electronic images. The logical next step for them is to eliminate the paper documents entirely.”
Granted, not every imaging application is an e-forms opportunity, but in situations where organizations have internal control over their documents, such as human resources departments, or a financial services organization that ImageSource recently helped convert over 200 paper forms to e-forms, they make a lot of sense. “I think IT infrastructures have evolved to the point where the components to support e-forms are typically already in place,” said Seamans. “Investments have been made VPNs, mobile computing, secure Web access, and other elements that make it fairly straightforward for users to access their e-forms. Users just need to plug an e-forms application into their existing IT environment, and they’re ready to go. Historically, there may have incremental costs associated with infrastructure upgrades that made e-forms applications harder to justify.”
On top of this, everyone seems to agree that e-forms are becoming easier to use. According to White, Cardiff’s LiquidOffice interface enables business managers, not IT personnel, to set up their own forms. “It’s fairly straightforward to design forms in such a way that they imitate the paper forms,” he said. “Change management is very important in these types of applications. You don’t want users to have to learn an entirely new forms interface, or the e-forms will prove too difficult to use to be successful.”
For more information: http://www.kofax.com;
Kofax press release
HSA press release
http://www.cardiff.com
http://www.imagesourceinc.com/index.htm |
