Capture Webcast Series: Captiva Intelligent Capture Release

I just finished up a two-part Webcast series in which we discussed the latest advancements of the EMC Captiva “intelligent capture” solution. If you missed the release announcement, EMC announced the latest Captiva InputAccel and Dispatcher releases on November 19th.

Joining me on part one of the Webcast series was Omri Duek from InfoTrends, who provided an analyst perspective on how capture has evolved over the years from simply digitizing information to fully utilizing captured information within line of business processes and enterprise applications. This can be attributed to the maturity of the capture technology around data recognition (reading information from documents), and the advances with intelligently identifying a wide range of documents (not just structured forms like a tax form or new account application, but all the less structured documents).

A key trend Omri highlighted is the shift from centralized capture to distributed capture, which is being driven by organizations wanting to leverage capture in a front office setting to further cut processing time and drive down cost. If you have remote employees who are mailing documents from branch offices to a central site where an individual(s) then opens the mail, preps the documents, and scans the documents, then pushing capture to the forefront is worth considering since there are significant business benefits that can be measured (reduced shipping cost, access to information, paper storage, etc).

With that said, distributed capture is not necessarily replacing centralized high volume batch capture, rather a “hybrid” approach is often necessary to address the various capture requirements.

Another area Omri hit on was around a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and leveraging capture as a service so that it can becomes an interactive process with other enterprise applications. New in the Captiva InputAccel 6 is exposing capture processes as services, where InputAccel receives a request, creates a batch based on the document images it ingest, and processes them according to the defined capture process. One could also use the InputAccel Web Services functionality to make a request to an external service that could handle anything from validating data, performing recognition (outside of InputAccel), and more. This should prove very useful to IT developers that want to provide a tighter “handshake” between capture and other business applications.

If you’re looking to see a live demonstration of the Captiva InputAccel 6 release, then you’ll want to check out part two of the webcast series. Dennis Demott, EMC Senior Systems Engineer, gives a nice overview of the latest release showing the new scan and index client interfaces, and the new administration console that delivers several key advancements including security roles, advance batch searches, and reporting. If you’d like to get the full InfoTrends analysis on this release, here’s a link to register and download the report – InfoTrends Analysis: InputAccel 6: Intelligent Capture for the Enterprise.

With that said, I’ll follow up with additional postings around the latest Captiva release, including the new advancements around leveraging capture as a service. Stay tuned for more…