Recap From Recent Webcast – “Why Captiva Over the Competition?”

Why Captiva over the competition?  Well there are lots good reasons (both technical and business) which I covered in a recent online Webcast. If you missed the Webcast, here’s the link to where you can listen to the recording.

Webcast: Why Captiva Over the Competition?

Enterprise capture defined

One of the areas I talked about in the Webcast is this notion of enterprise capture and how we define it. In a nutshell enterprise capture is about using a common document capture platform to capture documents for use by different departments, people, and processes.  Use of the software often spans across the entire enterprise supporting centralized mailroom/back office capture and distributed capture (front office, mobile workers, many devices).

There are a several key elements that make up a “true” enterprise capture product. Key elements would include:

• Scalability – High volume processing of forms and documents. The ability to scale and handle large volumes of pages. One thing to keep in mind is what volume a single server can handle. Anyone can claim supporting high volume environments by simply adding more servers. But is that really the best approach? If one vendor can handle X volume with 2 servers, but the other vendor requires 5 servers (this is all hypothetical), wouldn’t my support and maintenance cost be more if in fact I had to use 5 servers? I’d probably opt for the vendor who can do the same workload but with less servers.
• Speed (it’s blazing fast) – Time is money. And in some cases documents being captured are time sensitive. So the more effective I can breakdown and distribute the work, the better off I will likely be.
• Flexibility– Providing lots of flexibility so that capture is well-integrated into your processes and systems, and the process flows meet  your business needs.  Nothing is more painful than finding out later that the software really can’t do what you need it to do and being forced to add unnecessary steps to a capture process.
• Intelligent capture – Intelligent document classification and data extraction. This is very important! Some of the biggest savings will come from eliminating manually classifying documents and keying data. Manual document sorting and keying data  is very slow.
• Integration – Open architecture, with modern SDKs (.NET, Web services) for building custom modules and integrating with other systems is very important.
• Architecture that supports the full spectrum of capturing documents (distributed, centralized, scanners, MFPs, and other digital devices)
• Modular / services oriented – if you take a closer look at some vendors who claim to have an enterprise capture offering, you are likely to find that it is not in fact modular. Rather all the functionality gets delivered in one application.

These are just a few key points to consider when evaluating an enterprise capture product. Keep in mind enterprise capture is not just associated with high volume implementations.  Sometimes we get caught up on this notion that unless a company is doing very high volumes, than enterprise capture is not for them. This is really not the case. There are many requirements that are part of the evaluation and selection process, that go beyond what your document volumes will be.

Independent competitive report shows how Captiva is better

The other topic of discussion during the Webcast is  a new independent study that is out which shows how Captiva is better than another competitor in the market.  The vendor (Wipro) performed a series of lab based test looking at all key areas – setup, production, management, and design. Captiva scored better in all areas than the competitor. The recorded Webcast will give you a good overview of the highlights from the report.

Enterprise capture made easy

This is really about delivering the best of both worlds. We’ve taken the flexibility and powerful capabilities of Captiva InputAccel, and added a simple drag-and-drop capture process design application to make it easy to set up and deploy a capture process with the new InputAccel CaptureFlow Designer application.  You can read more about this new application in one of my earlier post.

So there you have it…enterprise capture defined, the key enterprise capture technical requirements, how Captiva is the better choice according to the latest independent competitive report, and now enterprise capture made easy with the new InputAccel CaptureFlow Designer.

-Bill-