BancTec, provider of  document capture and payment
processing services recently introduced CenterVision, its next generation platform for capturing and managing in-bound information, delivered as either an in-house implementation or as an outsourced service. (See press release for details.)

What I find most interesting about this announcement is its foreshadowing of the future (the future is here) of capture technology and vendors.  As I have posted before, the 2008 Q4 Market IQ will focus on the on-ramps and off-ramps of ECM.  What BancTec provides is obviously an on-ramp. To a certain degree the IQ will cover scanning technology and imaging, we have to.  While scanning and imaging technology may be passé, the volume of paper that remains in most businesses makes the issue and technology nonetheless relevant. That said vendors such as BancTec need not slowly fade into history, as the scanning technology becomes commodity.

There are two interesting points to this product announcement.  First, BancTec offers CenterVision  in a SaaS model. This is an interesting value proposition.  Customers do not necessarily have to incur the overhead, training etc.involved with content capture.  As capture technology becomes commodity, value add can be provided by offering it as a service, thus fitting it into a corporation outsourcing strategy, one that drives down costs and complexity, and allows the corporation to focus on its core competencies, rather than peripheral tasks such as content capture.

Second, the BancTec technology is content type agnostic. Incoming content will continue to be the impetus to business process/transactions, whether as paper to be scanned, e-mails to be processed and managed, or web-based content to be identified and processed.  Capture technology and vendors remain relevant when they migrate the fundamental capture process expertise to new/all forms of incoming content. in this case the functionality is positioned as a single point of capture.

Indeed, one of the most compelling capabilities of CenterVision is the added functionality of not only handling capture of all types of content, but in modularizing the capability as a component to process workflow.  CenterVision includes an executive dashboard and processing engine that enables managers to compile information on not only the number of documents they are processing, but also how efficiently the operation is running. The management dashboard allows organizations to quickly identify operational
issues and to acquire information helpful in improving the efficiency of the workflow.

And this brings me to the need to mention that the next, (Q3 2008) AIIM Market Intelligence report is on BPM and workflow.  My colleague, Dan Keldsen has posted on his blog, more detail on this IQ, and is soliciting your input on vendors, products, issues and functionality that should be included in our research.  So please, if you are at all interested in the topic, and want to have some control on the direction of our research, go to his blog and weigh in on topics/direction and/or products/vendors.

OK, back to the alert and Banctec - CenterVision represents the future of the capture market, going way beyond scanning, into content agnostic capture with integrated single point of capture process and intelligence, delivered as a service.  This is the future of content capture.