Slower Distributed Capture Growth?

By Mark Brousseau

Panelists at TAWPI’s Capture Conference admitted that they were surprised by the slowdown in growth of distributed capture solutions reported by TAWPI’s 2009 Document Management Study.

“When we looked at the report, we thought it was a very interesting statistic,” said Andrew Pery, chief marketing officer at Kofax, said during the panel discussion this morning in Ft. Lauderdale. “Based on our own experiences in the market, both distributed capture and remote capture are proliferating and there is increased adoption for both because of the benefits they provide.”

“The study shows that global and Fortune 500 companies are the primary users of distributed capture solutions with smaller firms using it in a more limited basis,” said Dana Showers of Capture Sage.

KeyMark CEO Jim Wanner told attendees that the recession has undoubtedly played a role in distributed capture “not taking off.” But Wanner said there is another issue within organizations that may be inhibiting growth: “There is a huge disconnect between the individuals responsible for scanning and the individuals making decisions on MFP devices. These individuals frequently don’t communicate effectively on how to solve the challenge of capture within the organization.’

The results of the TAWPI aside, the panelists saw growth ahead for distributed and remote capture.

“Distributed capture will continue to grow,” predicted Ken Kriz, manager of strategic alliances for AnyDoc Software. “But it can’t grow at its previous pace because it cannot overtake centralized scanning. Some organizations will utilize distributed capture, and some of them will not.”

“The use of Citrix has really taken off, which will help distributed processing,” Showers added.

Pery noted that despite the popularity of ATM banking, 63 percent of respondents to a recent study said they prefer to interact with a bank branch employee – illustrating that the ability to deploy remote capture solutions and multi-function devices are becoming more strategic. “We’re also seeing expanded use of capture at the fringes of the enterprise, such as with field agents,” he said.

Going forward, the panelists saw mobile phones as another remote input stream for images.

“High-production users won’t use cell phones to scan documents in the back office, but they might be one of the inputs into a high-production system,” Kriz told conference attendees.

What do you think? Post your comments below.