In case you haven’t heard, the document capture industry is experiencing advancements in technology innovation, and not all vendors are created equal. While the idea of document capture may seem mundane, it is one of the core business processes that is helping companies start their digital transformation journey, thus making it a very exciting industry to watch. Business intelligence, business processes and business outcomes – these are all common terms that are heavily emphasized in most verticals because CEOs now have potential to measure results and their data. This means leaders can drive data-based, analytical decisions, which gives them a competitive advantage. It’s a logical method.
What’s exciting about document capture platforms is that it can alter an entire organizations business processes, and therefore, its success. Sure, it’s just one part of the bigger picture, but document capture is an important one. It takes away laborious data entry, preparation, sorting, tagging, classification, filing and more. And, even if you think things like contracts, records, applications and other documents are digital (in the form of an email, Word document or PDF), that data is often unsearchable and unfindable, which we refer to as “dark data.” Advanced document capture solutions can now make that unstructured data into structured data, which can be accessed and used to make better business decisions.
At Harvey Spencer’s recent Capture Software Conference, he gave some insight into the overall capture industry as leaders from around the world gathered in New York. First, last year the capture market grew worldwide between 7% to 10% depending on the global region. They predicted the market would keep at this pace for the next five years. Vertical growth is most prevalent in Banking & Financial Services, Insurance, Central Government and Manufacturing, with slow growth in Healthcare. Further trends show that the majority of enterprise companies have already implemented capture services while the next biggest growth market is the mid-market. In summary, Spencer predicted there is a $30 billion market for worldwide opportunities – which should generate even more anticipation with the sheer number.
What’s particularly interesting is that the advanced document capture’s future rests in the cloud. This notion was reiterated not only at the Capture Software Conference, but at the recent BoxWorks 2017 conference. The terminology “Capture-as-a-Service” has not been widely adopted, partly because many vendors are laggards in capture cloud technology. Ephesoft was first to announce its CaaS platform availability with Microsoft Azure earlier this year. The Ephesoft platform supports supervised machine learning with their patented technology and analytics platform. Their tenacity is demonstrated by having their software included in newly launched Box Skills framework that supports content services with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies, including Ephesoft for document intelligence, Google for image intelligence, IBM for audio intelligence and Microsoft for video intelligence.
The message is clear: technology leaders are innovating in the cloud through AI and machine learning to help customer drive positive business results. Next generation CaaS software that is simple and ease of use is now a necessity to complete tedious and complex tasks. The true “State of Capture” is continuously evolving and learning, proving to be quite a transformative and enticing industry.
