Traditionally, capture systems are all about large mail rooms, tons of paper documents, high speed scanners, and software applications which can handle these types of loads. Companies like Captiva (EMC now) and Kofax built or acquired products which suit such capture needs and became market leaders over the years. While majority of the capture requirements in the US and some western European countries still resemble to what is described above, the new markets offer a totally different challenge.
If you take a closer look at the leading capture applications in the US, you can easily figure out that they cashed in big on the healthcare system in that country. For example, Captiva has a bunch of offerings for healthcare claims processing alone! I guess many concepts on data capture were evolved while trying to solve health claims processing as a business problem. And these concepts might have gotten acceptance across multiple vertical segments as well.
The US and many other western countries do have good physical infrastructure for shipping paper across efficiently. So, centralized capture work in these markets reasonably well. In many emerging countries, the situation is very different. Many of the countries have reasonably good communication infrastructure, but they lack the physical infrastructure and logistics systems. So, data capture systems in these countries will need to be distributed, and document and data shipping will have to be in electronic mode. What this means is that products such as InputAccel or Ascent Capture will not be viable for these markets.
Of course, these products mentioned above do have distributed versions. Many of these products come with a lot more features than what is actually required. More features are always fine, but the price tag is not!! It is a challenge to convince a customer in a country like India to buy a distributed Kofax Document Exchange Server.
The need for these markets is a simple capture application which can scan, index and send the images and index data to a central site. It needs to handle a volume of 1000 pages to 1500 pages a day. Often 10-15 pages are scanned together which constitute a set of documents required for a single transaction. It would be great if there are features like automated document separation using position within the scan set or using barcodes or patch codes. The icing on the cake will be features like cropping of specified zones of the scanned page (Usually for signature or photo), offline/online capabilities, and integration capabilities to FileNet, Documentum, Oracle UCM or Interwoven. The pricing could be anywhere between USD 150-250 per location.
If there is a capture product out there which can meet these criteria, I bet it will be a leader in these markets.
Posted by Susanth 