Hardware, software, and services behemoth IBM today announced that it has acquired Datacap Inc., a purveyor of enterprise content management technology focused on document capture and related forms of data entry automation.
The tie-up culminates a partnership that lasted for 15 years. IBM did not reveal what it paid for the privately held, New York-based company, which opened its doors in 1988, but said it will nest the Datacap technology within the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) portfolio, part of IBM’s Software Solutions Group.
Datacap’s portfolio includes a broad sweep of applications, from document and invoice scanning and processing to records management. The software is said to convert into actionable form unstructured data, such as e-mail messages, image files, and PowerPoint presentations.
While Datacap’s technology is particularly useful in paper-intensive industries, such as healthcare, insurance, and finance, an IBM spokesman today said the company considers the industrial market a growth area for document capture applications. Prospective uses for the software include automated supplier invoice processing with integration to accounts payable functions in ERP systems, as well as a system of e-mail management that includes recognition, classification, and routing of supplier e-mails to a back-end system of record.
“We’ve chosen to make Datacap’s approach the foundation of IBM’s document capture strategy,” said Ron Ercanbrack, vice president of Enterprise Content Management for IBM, in a statement. ”Datacap’s approach to image capture, using sophisticated business rules management, sets it above the rest in the industry and provides the most complementary capabilities for IBM.”
No stranger to acquisitions, IBM made a similar move exactly four years ago to the day, when it announced its $1.6 billion takeover of FileNet, an enterprise content management specialist. The Datacap technology will “supplement [IBM’s] existing FileNet Capture offering,” the spokesman toldManaging Automation in an e-mail exchange today. “The Datacap acquisition expands IBM’s leadership position in the market by offering a suite of capture solutions that enhance current ECM offerings and support non-IBM repositories from EMC, OpenText, Oracle, Microsoft, and others,” a trait that he said demonstrates IBM’s commitment to “heterogeneous content repositories.
Source:-http://www.managingautomation.com/maonline/news/read/IBM_Acquires_Business_Automation_Specialist_33633
