The Future of Documents

Nuance announced yesterday that it acquired eCopy, a leading provider of solutions integrating paper documents into business software applications, for about $54 million in stock.

That extends Nuance’s footprint in owning paper- and document-intensive business processes. This acquisition should complement nicely their desktop scanning applications and Intelligent Document Recognition technologies with eCopy’s server-based offering and direct access to workflows from Multifunction Printers, as well as connectivity into over 100 entreprise ECM and ERP systems.

Nuance is on an aggressive acquisition strategy, as they already acquired another (smaller) company in that space a few months ago, ScanFlowStore, and is in line with a global consolidation trend in document management and processing.

This interesting post: “The New Way to Work: The Future of Document Management Software“  caught my attention. Although very high-level and generic, the vision remains quite interesting – and very much in sync with my own.

This enticed me to learn more about Huddle.net, which I did not know much about yet. Huddle is a cloud-based Document Management Software, with a strong focus on collaboration. It is in the vein of some of the online tools that I reported on during my Office 2.0 coverage last year,  but with an interesting twist which might make it appealing for companies with distributed teams.

Its uploading and online editing (Word and Excel) capabilities are relatively standard, but its “project dashboard”, workflow capabilities,  and audit trail of documents, make it sound like a very good tool for small companies with intensive document processing and interaction needs. What does not hurt, too, is the included support for online collaboration, including phone and web conferencing, IM, and an interesting “Whiteboard”.

Probably an interesting player to watch in that Document 2.0 space.

Vacation are great, but you sometimes miss important news like this one.

Canon recently announced the acquisition of 17% of IRIS group SA. IRIS is a well known player in Intelligent Document Recognition, but also to some extent in Entreprise Content Management. Canon and IRIS had started their relationship around IRIS’s latest scanning software suite, which is used for electronic archiving and compression.

This is another example of a traditional hardware (print and scan-) company moving into document management solutions, and enabling a tighter connection between their Multi-Function Devices / scanners and their customer’s paper-intensive workflows. The next logical step might be, just like Xerox Global Services, to strengthen its Services offering beyond simple Managed Print Services, into Pofessional Document and Business Process Services, including generic Imaging and Document Management Services, or more specialized services such as Client Acquisition and Lifecycle Management, Finance and Administration Services, or Mortgage Services.

It is interesting to compare with Océ, who moved the opposite direction by selling its Océ Document Technologies to Captaris about 1.5 years back.

So, which model is right – Océ moving away, or Xerox, and gradually Canon, moving into Document Management and Business Process Services? Time will tell – I have an idea, but I might be biased

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!