The Future of Documents

More consolidation in the ECM (Entreprise Content Management) space – OpenText announced last week that they would acquire Vignette for 310 M$. OpenText is one of the last remaining proprietary vendors in the CMS space.

Although that deal is interesting financially given Vignette’s current financial troubles, analysts question the strategy behind it. there is not currently a strategy or plan to integrate the two overlapping technologies, and ECM and Web Content Management (WCM) technologies will remain distinct technologies for OpenText. Not to mention the integration nightmares, caused by very heterogeneous technologies.

Less than a year after acquiring Captaris, OpenText seems to not suffer from “acquisition indigestion” apparently. This market, overall, is undergoing significant consolidation, as Autonomy and Interwoven recently showed. Is that the only way to survive?

Most major companies are suffering from Information Overload, and in particular dealing with very large amounts of incoming paper and digital information. This information needs to be manually processed, before it can be delivered to the right knowledge worker in your organization – and in many cases, it can take up to 15 days for that information to be delivered to the right person. So think about your typical customer request – by the time you get back to her, she has moved away and is presumably very dissatisfied with your company. Turnaround is key.

This is why Xerox is working on technologies to address Information Overload. One such technique was mentioned in this article in The Times magazine ”Confronting the information overload”. Called the Hybrid Categorizer, this technology automatically sorts and classifies documents. As opposed to existing techniques, which solely rely on “visual” (e.g. shapes) or “textual” (words) to recognize a doctype, Hybrid Categorizer takes into account both the visual and textual information. 

Plus it fully leverages Machine Learning – meaning it “learns” what characterizes each doctype, as opposed to requiring a human to “teach” (often) subjective rules. It is therefore capable of achieving a quantum leap in the Automatic Document Recognition it can achieve – this with minimal setup and errors.

I’ll cover some real use case studies of Hybrid in the future – this technology is used in many applications including the Digital Mailroom, which is part of Mail and Distribution Services. For more information click on this brief illustrative video:

EMC, the leader in Entreprise Capture technologies, recently announced the next step towards a more efficient Document Processing infrastructure – their new InputAccel and Dispatcher version 6 establish a new benchmark for Document Processing and Capture.

The most interesting part of the announcement is probably their adoption of a standard Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This will enable much simpler integration into entreprise applications, allowing individual scanners and multifunction to become portals at different steps into your business processes – not only as the entrypoint. The power of Dispatcher technologies becomes available to any office device, not only to high-end production scanning centres. Plus best-of-breed 3rd party technologies can also be integrated seamlessly – no more VB-scripting and direct dll invocation.

The next logical step might be to host that infrastructure on “the cloud” to make Document Capture 2.0 not only available to each office device in large entreprises, but also to SMBs. Sounds promising!