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IBM Acquires Datacap; who will be captured next?
13 August 2010IBM announced the acquisition of Datacap Inc., a privately-held company based in Tarrytown, NY. Datacap is a provider of software that enables organizations to transform the way they capture, manage and automate the flow of business information to improve business processes, reduce paper costs or manual errors and meet compliance mandates. Financial terms were not disclosed.
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The announcement of IBM's acquisition of capture software company Datacap would appear to continue the cycle of acquisitions by the top tier ECM vendors in the intelligent capture software space, following on from EMC's acquisition of Captiva (2005); Oracle's acquisition of Captovation and Open Text's addition of Captaris to their ECM offerings (2008). Although IBM inherited solid capture capabilities of their own following their acquisition of FileNet (2006), this latest acquisition highlights the importance of Document Capture, most notably in the Transaction Processing area, Logistics and Supply Chain, Healthcare and other case management applications that require the intelligent capture and classification of data and documents.
In particular, the Datacap offerings have a very nice fit in the healthcare space. Over the last decade, IBM has been slow in providing broad solutions in the healthcare space. With the advent of new healthcare initiatives in the US, a great deal of money is available in this space. Embracing and embedding Datacap solutions will allow IBM to attack this broader healthcare space far more effectively.
There are still many independent capture and imaging software technology companies that will no doubt be on the radar for vendors particularly in the BPM, BI, Healthcare, e-invoicing, e-procurement and e-payments sectors. Throw in e-discovery vendors, leading hardware scanning and MFD manufacturers, as well as Document Outsource & BPO service providers, one can readily see the increasing importance of capture as the on ramp for a wide range of business process applications and an increasingly core technical requirement for companies active in these areas.