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...document and image management.
So how come the marketplace still treats imaging like hillbilly cousin? Imaging--or "intelligent data capture" as the marketing spinsters would have you call it--has been the "next big thing" for more than a decade. I know; I started Imaging Magazine in 1991.
Back in that day, we talked about the nagging mechanical and technical limitations that imaging needed to overcome before hitting the mainstream. No lie ... we worried about things like how white-out would reflect in a scanner and how to get dust off a roller. "Best Practices in Removing Staples," for cryin' out loud.
That's because imaging was all about volume. Big piles of paper that needed to become big digital files on a big optical disc. As fast as possible.
That was then and this is now. Imaging/data capture has broken free from its mundane past to take a seat at the business-performance table. Now ... all we have to do is get someone to notice.
"This isn't about scanning dead documents," says Mark Seamans senior vice president of research and development at Verity. "There's a compelling business value. If I can get paper-based information online as step one, this not only creates a lower-cost way to do something, but I can also gain a competitive advantage. I can do something in three hours that it takes my competitor five days. Many times the first step is a transaction that involves paper. But that's not the ending point."
"Imaging isn't the sexiest thing to talk about," adds Bruce Milne, senior director of product marketing for Vignette. "A lot of problems have been solved, but successful customers aren't really vocal about it. It's a stealth technology; everybody's deploying it, but not talking about it much.
"We're seeing a convergence point," continues Milne. "Companies want to get off paper, and they're looking for the right combination of things like imaging and portals and workflow Imaging can be part of a bigger customer-care initiative and a less expensive transaction model at the same time."
Arriving at that conclusion has been a challenge for the imaging market since day one. "Imaging has been, for as long as we all can remember, a slowly growing, slowly simmering market," says Bill Priemer, vice president of sales and marketing for Hyland Software. "It never really took off, like CRM or ERP or Web content management. It never had a period of explosion, either in terms of customer adoption or widespread awareness. That's because these discrete technologies--imaging, report management. OCR, etc.--have never been pulled...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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