The Birth of Capture 2.0 Cloud Services

This article appears in the Summer 2018 digital issue of DOCUMENT Strategy. Subscribe.

When a newspaper erroneously reported that Mark Twain had died, legend holds that he said, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” The same could be said about the apparent demise of paper and the obsolescence of documents themselves. With such a focus on digital transformation, many investors, upper-level decision makers, and stakeholders share a common line of thinking: “Paper is dead and so are the hardware, software, and solutions associated with documents.”

Is the world as we know it over? Are we in a post-paper environment? Well, it’s trending in that direction more and more. So, is capture technology destined to go the way of landline phones, film photography, and the dinosaur? Not even close. While it’s no surprise that paper is in decline, what hasn’t changed is the need for organizations to take the data flowing into the enterprise and transform it into usable information.

The world-wide market potential for Capture 2.0 services is over $30 billon.

Organizations run on information to execute business processes, maintain compliance, and exceed customer expectations. Organizations that most efficiently utilize relevant information are able to serve their stakeholders more effectively and improve overall competitiveness. Without the ability to transform an increasing amount of data into valuable information, organizations are at risk of missing critical business information or falling out of compliance.

Capture 2.0 is technology that takes content from a variety of formats (paper or electronic), makes it understandable, and then routes that information to automated business processes. Since its inception as a software category, capture has long adapted itself to enable business processes and to eliminate the associated manual work, often involving key strokes.

Recently, a lot of attention has turned to robotic process automation (RPA), a technology that essentially emulates manual key entry to improve efficiencies. Automating keystrokes is a good first step, but organizations must also be able to understand and identify important content, allowing for data to be extracted and then accurately inserted into the automated business process. To take RPA to the next level, organizations are now looking at technology based on Capture 2.0, including:

Optical Character Recognition/Intelligent Character Recognition
Image Recognition
Object Recognition
Voice Recognition
Natural Language Processing
Semantic Understanding
Sentiment Analysis

As businesses rely on digital content more and more, we will move toward Capture 2.0 cloud services. These services are designed to make business processes work more efficiently and effectively. Capture 2.0 services will be delivered through RESTful APIs as part of a cloud service architecture.

This has major implications for how new solutions are developed and delivered. Capture 2.0 architecture provides the ability to implement capture services into business process applications that have not had easy access to capture technology in the past. This type of content services architecture also provides the ability to rapidly design custom solutions. Harvey Spencer Associates estimates that the world-wide market potential for Capture 2.0 services is over $30 billon.

The future is exciting and bright for Capture 2.0 and for those embracing this technology in a post-paper, digital world.

Mike Spang is the Vice President of Research at Harvey Spencer Associates, where he focuses on capture software and content services market analysis. Contact Mike at mike.spang@hsassocs.com or visit www.hsassocs.com.