Information explosion driving capture growth

Posted by Mark Brousseau

There continues to be an enormous explosion of information, Alan Kerr, executive vice president of field operations, Kofax, said this morning during Kofax Transform 2011 Americas in San Diego. There also are “more and more ways” that information is coming into an organization, Kerr added.

It’s for these reasons that capture solutions are becoming more strategic, Kerr said. “People have to be able to increase service, meet compliance demands, and take costs out of the business,” Kerr said.

Not surprisingly, Kofax thinks the future is bright for capture solutions. “The capture market is about $2 billion a year and is expected to grow at an 11 percent compound annual growth rate through 2013,” Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish told attendees during his opening address.

Why the growth in capture solutions? Bish identified several driving factors:

… “As we improve our products, we continue to growth the market,” he said.
… “There is an increasing realization on the part of our customers that the paper will not go away,” Bish said. “Users have concluded that the only way to make it go away is to scan it.”
… “Paper is a compliance risk,” he noted.
… “There is a desire to convert all of that unstructured content into accessible information,” Bish said.
… “We have seeded the market for enterprise solutions with our tactical installations,” he said.
… “We can deliver proven short-term return on investments, often through the elimination of manual processes,” Bish said.

The growth of capture solutions represents “a lot of potential, as well as some challenges,” for Kofax Transform 2011 Americas attendees, Bish said.

For end-users, the challenge is to unlock the data stuck in their paper-driven business processes. “Improving business processes starts with information,” Kerr noted. “How do you capture this information? How do you transform it to make it useful? And how do you exchange it across the enterprise?”

For their part, capture vendors have to be able to provide departmental solutions, enterprise solutions, big batch back-office solutions, and knowledge solutions, Kerr said. “You have to be able to scale up and across. You must also be able to support global capabilities,” Kerr added.

So what else are end-users looking for from a capture solutions provider? Kerr said there are several key criteria:

… Partners that understand the end-user’s business problems and enterprise
… A financially stable company that is investing in the marketplace
… A strategic business relationship
… Return on investment

Against this backdrop, Bish concluded: “I really believe that the future is really bright here at Kofax and there is a tremendous opportunity for us to engage with end-users and our channel partners.”

What do you think?