By Scott Swidersky, Director, Information Systems Division and President, DocPoint Solutions

Across all industry sectors, businesses have gone through periods of mergers and acquisitions. The Electronic Content Management (ECM) industry is no different. Economic conditions are creating the opportunity for companies to join forces with their competition. Take, for example, OpenText’s acquisition of Captaris and Kodak’s acquisition of BÖWE BELL + HOWELL’s scanner division.

The economy is also making manufacturers focus on building more cost-effective products with highly useful new features. Manufacturers have recognized the need for solutions that work across distributed environments and they are bringing to market new Internet-based solutions that can address multi-site, nationwide, and/or global requirements. What does this mean for you?

Choices.

The rapidly changing supplier landscape is impacting your choice of products. In many cases, manufacturers can now offer everything from low-volume, desktop solutions to high-volume options.

More Options.

The server-based or “thin-client” method of data capture is becoming increasingly popular with product manufacturers. End users appreciate the ease of deployment, lower cost of ownership, and reliability of these systems and are raising demand for more of these products. Increased Automation. Today’s new data capture solutions are more streamlined and user-friendly than previous generations. The ability to automate the capture process has also become more reliable for items like high-volume transactions, forms processing, or handwriting recognition.