Business Trends on Converting Paper Processes to Electronic Format

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Business Trends on Converting Paper Processes to Electronic Format
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                                                       NASHVILLE, TN—Capture is not always called
                                                     capture anymore. End users consuming it are more
                                                     often than ever business analysts who look at
    ORLANDO—Microsoft has officially
                                                     capture as part of an overall automation initiative
  announced a document capture product.
                                                     within their digital transformation (DX) strategies.
  Incorporated in Microsoft’s new Project
                                                     To them, capture is “OCR” or “AI” and it’s used to
  Cortex is a capture service that is tightly
                                                     take unstructured content, from both paper and
  integrated with SharePoint. It is driven by a
                                                     electronic documents, and convert
  pair of engines developed by Microsoft
                                                     it into something their
  and hosted on Azure. Microsoft has
                                                     electronically driven business
  leveraged its AI Builder interface to create
                                                     processes can understand.
  a front-end for these services designed to
  be utilized by non-programmers.
                                                       Okay, so that second part is kind
                                                     of what capture has always
    The announcement was made at
                                                     done—but it’s how capture
  Microsoft Ignite, the platform giant’s annual
                                                     processes are being executed
  developer and ISV fest, which was held at
                                                     that is changing. No longer strictly
  the Orange County Convention Center and
                                                     implemented with a top-down, IT-
  attended by more than 20,000 people.
                                                     heavy, focus—capture vendors are
  Microsoft is pitching Project Cortex as a
                                                     finding success in today’s market
  way to apply “AI to automatically organize
                                                     putting technology in the hands of “citizen
  your content.” In addition to capture, Cortex
                                                     developers.” This was evident at last month’s
  includes expanded meta data and
                                                     ABBYY Content IQ Summit held at the Gaylord
  taxonomy capabilities for Office 365, search
                                                     Opryland, where sessions on the ISV’s recently
  connections to locations like MediaWiki,
                                                     launched Vantage product, which is squarely
  ServiceNow and file shares, and
                                                     aimed at democratization of capture [see DIR
  knowledge management—yes, Microsoft is
                                                     4/12/19], were packed with enthusiastic attendees
  bringing that term back into vogue.
                                                     snapping photos and asking questions.
  Microsoft announced Project Cortex as “the
  first new service in Microsoft 365 since the
                                                       The conference also focused on ABBYY’s recent
  launch of Microsoft Teams [March 2017.]”
                                                     acquisition of TimelinePI, a process analytics ISV
  The first version is due for release into
                                                     whose technology is being positioned as
  general availability in the first half of 2020.
                                                     complementary to capture as a pillar of ABBYY’s
                                                     focus on improving organizations’ “Digital IQ.”
    Microsoft’s capture technology is built on
                                                     “Digital IQ is our brand of digital intelligence—an
  top of its Form Recognizer and Text
                                                     emerging market that a lot of people are starting
  Analytics services, which are both currently
                                                     to reference,” said Anthony Macciola, Chief
  available for licensing as part of its
                                                     Innovation Officer of ABBYY, during an exclusive
  Cognitive Services offerings on Azure. Form
                                                     conversation with      . “One pillar is Vantage for
  Recognizer is machine learning driven
                                                     content IQ and the second is Timeline for process
  technology designed for extraction of data
                                                     IQ. We will add another pillar in 2020 and another
  from structured and semi-structured
                                                     one in 2021.”
During his portion of the keynote, Macciola explained
that ABBYY is positioning itself within the $322 billion
decision management segment of DX. “It’s about
helping people make better decisions quickly, and
creating value from their data,” he said. “This means we
are never going to do RPA or BPM. We want to increase
intelligence related to those solutions and make them
more valuable.”

  In addition to capture, RPA and process intelligence
were the two most popular topics at the conference.
Macciola credits RPA for driving the trend toward
“democratization” in capture. “This trend started with
EFSS’s [enterprise file sync and share] impingement on
the ECM space,” he told       . “With ECM, if you wanted
to share and sync files, it was an IT-centric activity, the
licenses were expensive, and deployment could be
sophisticated. So, along comes something like Box and
                                                                                                                  Vol. 30, No. 13
now everyone is enabled to set it up themselves with no
IT dependency.

  “We see the exact same thing happening with RPA. If
you go back five years, if people wanted to re-engineer
a business process, they would have been using BPM,
which can also be very IT-centric and expensive. Then,
along comes RPA and business users realize they don’t
have to wait for IT, they can do this themselves. With
RPA, you have knowledge workers creating automation
for tasks they are responsible for. And, guess what?
They are probably the best suited to know what needs
to be done, instead of writing requirements and having
IT figure it out. So, we saw this democratization trend
happening with automation and it became very
apparent to us that the same thing was going to
happen with capture.”

  It’s no secret that ABBYY has had great success
partnering with RPA vendors. It started with the vendors
licensing ABBYY’s FineReader OCR engine to create
their own capture processes. It expanded into ABBYY
licensing FlexiCapture (a traditional capture
application) to many RPA users. “We have been very
successful with FlexiCapture in RPA implementations,
because, for many RPA users, the starting point for
adding cognitive technology into their robots is
finance,” said Bruce Orcutt, VP, product marketing, for
ABBYY. “It’s typically an accounts payable use case,
which FlexiCapture nails right out of the box.”

  According to Orcutt, sales of FlexiCapture for Invoices
grew 86% YOY, primarily driven by RPA. So, what was
the point of introducing Vantage, which ABBYY is
positioning as ideal for integration with RPA? “Vantage
is really about self-service—it’s simple to use and
designed to be set up by the knowledge worker,” said
Orcutt. “So, it doesn’t have the same complexity as
FlexiCapture.”

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About a week before the ABBYY conference,                                                   have not been exposed to capture and are now
heading into the UiPath conference, a press                                                   being presented with it through a digital
release was issued touting ABBYY’s success with                                               transformation initiative.”
its RPA partner. We noticed that most of the wins
discussed were for FlexiCapture and began to
wonder if Vantage was gaining any traction.                                                    Capture as a part of DX certainly has the
“While Vantage is the preferred interface for                                                 technology going through a bit of a
RPA users—and customers respond very well to                                                  renaissance. This is reflected in a host of new
it—it’s still a version one product and has some                                                                        vendors entering the
shortcomings,” said                                                                                                     space leveraging AI
Orcutt. “Maybe it                                                                                                       and machine learning
doesn’t support all                                                                                                     algorithms for document
the aspects of a use                                                                                                    classification and
case or the user                                                                                                        extraction. This includes
needs the robustness                                                                                                    well-funded start-ups
of FlexiCapture. We                                                                                                     like HyperScience,
have been teaching                                                                                                      Ocrolus, and Taiger
our salespeople to                                                                                                      that we have covered in
sell Vantage and                                                                                                            , as well several
fulfill with                                                                                                            others. It also includes
FlexiCapture.”                                                                                                          technology giants like
                                                                                                                        Microsoft, Amazon,
 That said, ABBYY is continuing to develop                                                    and Google, who have launched their own
Vantage, and, in his keynote, Macciola noted                                                  capture initiatives.
that at some point, it is likely the two products
will converge. There were also reports of ABBYY                                                 It’s unclear how much some of these initiatives
recently landing a large Vantage deal.                                                        rely on traditional OCR—which is a staple of
                                                                                              ABBYY’s business, as its FineReader Engine has
 Macciola’s view is that a product like Vantage                                               historically been a major revenue producer.
has the potential to greatly expand the                                                       “What’s happening in the market is that people
addressable capture market. “I remember in the                                                are confusing data capture with OCR,” said
old days, I’d be talking to people from FileNet                                               Orcutt. “All OCR does is convert analog images
and Documentum, and we were all very proud                                                    into text, which is often the first step in a data
of our market penetration,” he said. “We’d cite                                               capture process. You still have to run processes
facts like 84 of the top 100 banks were using our                                             to determine the meaning of that text.
technology. But, I think maybe we were
measuring ourselves by the wrong metric. We                                                    “And companies like ABBYY, Kofax, IBM, and
might have been in one or two projects at those                                               Brainware (now owned by Hyland) are all built
banks, so if you measured our success                                                         using OCR. I would argue that these capture
horizontally, we were doing really well. But, if                                              vendors are processing more documents
you measured our success vertically, in how far                                               globally than any of those that say they don’t
we had penetrated into these enterprises—then                                                 use traditional OCR.”
you could see that the entire capture, ECM, and
even BPM markets were just skimming across                                                     Interestingly, the service bureau Ripcord,
the top.                                                                                      which counts Google as an investor and at the
                                                                                              AIIM show told me they were relying on the
  “Democratized technology is addressing the                                                  open source Tesseract OCR engine combined
same enterprises, but from the bottom up. So,                                                 with Google’s Machine Vision technology, was
while maybe back then we had reached 15-20%                                                   a sponsor at the ABBYY Content IQ Summit. “We
penetration on processes, the other 80% is now                                                have found that there are a variety of different
waking up. When we get called into an account                                                 OCR and classification tools that have been
with one of our RPA partners, we find that we                                                 effectively commoditized but that there are
are not talking to capture experts, and they are                                              some tools that are better than others,” said
amazed that we can capture headers and                                                        Ahson Ahmad, Chief Product Officer, for
footers on invoices. I remember being at a                                                    Ripcord. “There are also different price points,
meeting recently where our salesperson was                                                    so depending on the needs of our customers
looking at me like, ‘what planet have these                                                   and their budgets, and depending on the kind
people been living on for the past 20 years?’                                                 of content we are getting, we will plug in
But, it’s really just a whole new set of buyers that                                          different engines.”

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Ripcord currently licenses ABBYY FineReader                                                  around it is what is going to differentiate you.
for OCR and classification and is rolling out
FlexiCapture for an invoice application. “We                                                    “I don’t want to denigrate our competitors, but
think of our ourselves as a service vendor that                                               a lot of the start-ups we see are specializing in
has classification and extraction capabilities,”                                              one area. It’s easy to make things better by
said Ahmad. “We create a dynamic of skill                                                     narrowing your scope. We’ve been doing
selection to fulfill our customers’ needs.”                                                   capture for 30 years and we’ve done the entire
                                                                                              gamut of use cases. We feel our technology is
  ABBYY, of course, has traditionally leveraged                                               more robust, more mature and handles the
its own FineReader engine in its data capture                                                 fringe cases better. When you are new at it,
products, but Macciola indicated that the ISV                                                 there are a lot of things that pop up that you
must not be afraid to embrace change if the                                                   didn’t even realize were going to be problems.”
market dictates. “Vendors like Google,
Microsoft, and Amazon don’t have solutions,
they have technology stacks—and I think this                                                    To complement its capture technology, ABBYY
will help fuel a whole new round of ISVs                                                      acquired TimelinePI [see DIR 5/24/19]. Scott
entering the capture space—all leveraging this                                                Opitz, the co-founder, and now president of
refreshed AI technology,” he said. “This could                                                ABBYY Process Intelligence, described his
put a lot of the more mature vendors at risk of                                               company’s technology as the combination of
becoming irrelevant.                                                                          process mining with monitoring to see if
                                                                                              changes are having their desired affects.
  “To prevent this, you can’t be afraid to disrupt                                            “Ultimately, you need to predict the outcomes
yourself. A lot of the strategy we are pursuing in                                            of processes and make changes to improve
Vantage is designed to reduce the risk of                                                     those outcomes,” said ABBYY CEO Ulf Persson
irrelevance. For example, even though we have                                                 during his keynote. “Our Digital IQ strategy is
a visual classifier that we continue to improve                                               about being able to extract valuable
and make easier to use, I can’t guarantee that it                                             information not only from processes but from
will be the best one available. At some point,                                                documents in those processes as well.”
we might want to license technology from
someone like Google. Vantage is extensible, so                                                  Opitz may be familiar to those in our industry
we can plug in whatever technology we want.”                                                  from his work with Kofax, which he joined after
                                                                                              another company he founded, Altosoft, was
 Macciola noted that this is a different                                                      acquired. Altosoft was an analytics and
approach for ABBYY. “Historically, we have                                                    business intelligence ISV where Opitz first
been closed and everything we used was                                                        began to see the value of process intelligence.
ours,” he said. “But, we’ve come to the                                                       “At Altosoft, we needed to find ways to make
realization that there are some things that we                                                certain types of calculations related to
are good at and able to focus on and other                                                    processes,” said Opitz. “This started my
areas where we’ll need to embrace                                                             experimentation with what I call ‘process
alternatives. For example, currently we have a                                                intelligence’ features, such as the timing
Vantage skill that does signature recognition                                                 between activities and counting how many
and we felt it would be stupid for us to build                                                things went a certain way vs. another way.
that on our own, so we reached out to a                                                       What we came up with was dramatically easier
competitor to license it. We are also working                                                 to use than what other BI tools were offering,
with big consultancies that build their own AI                                                but it was only a tiny way to where we are
and want to leverage it in Vantage                                                            now. Still, those couple features seemed to
applications. We are going to try and push the                                                resonate very strongly with people.”
envelope in everything we develop, but we
can’t do everything. It’s important for us to allow                                            Opitz went on to explain the difference
our customers to have a framework where they                                                  between BI and process intelligence. “BI is very
can use whatever they want.”                                                                  good at giving an analysis of a single point of a
                                                                                              process, such as how many new orders did I
  At the end of the day, Macciola said it’s about                                             receive today or how many things did I ship?
being able to develop capture applications that                                               What BI does not do is give you any way to
work in the real world. “A lot of this AI and                                                 associate those different types of activities in
machine learning stuff is really cool, but setting                                            the same instance of a process.”
it up and getting it to work well is not trivial,” he
said. “The technology stack is important but                                                   Opitz breaks down process intelligence into
how you expose it and everything you do                                                       two parts. “The first is discovery and analytics,

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which you could make the argument is a                                                        selling to the exact same person that buys
process mining tool,” he told      . “You use it to                                           capture.”
reconstruct all the processes by gathering
events, such as those involved in an invoice                                                    Reggie Twigg, director of product marketing at
process, from various systems. You do this by                                                 ABBYY, concurred that having TimelinePI in the
using some sort of qualifier like an invoice                                                  portfolio has helped introduce ABBYY to more
number. So, you would put together all events                                                 business analyst type buyers. “TimelinePI’s
that have the same invoice number and that                                                    audience is the people responsible for
would give you the lifecycle of that invoice. That                                            measuring business processes—business
would be one timeline, and it could be spread                                                 owners and analysts,” he told      . “With
out over several days. Being able reconstruct,                                                Timeline, we are able to position ourselves as a
visualize and analyze these events is what we                                                 ‘know your process’ company, and we can help
consider the first phase of process intelligence.”                                            customers find what they need to fix. This will
                                                                                              often lead to a discussion about our capture
 According to Opitz, this mining is enabled                                                   products with people who have never been
through the reporting tools of most modern                                                    exposed to them. This is at least partially
business applications. “They produce audit trails                                             responsible for our huge uptick in FlexiCapture
that we can use,” he said. “For cloud-based                                                   for Invoices sales.”
applications, like Salesforce or ServiceNow,
there are SaaS connectors, because it’s a                                                      Like Vantage, TimelinePI is designed with
cloud-to-cloud connection.” (TimelinePI is a                                                  democratization in mind. “The product is
cloud-first application.)                                                                     geared toward customer enablement—it
                                                                                              shouldn’t require a lot of professional services,”
  Opitz defines process intelligence as the                                                   said Opitz. “The real challenge is more about
second piece in TimelinePI’s offering. “That is                                               the bureaucratic steps that must be taken to get
using the information gained in the first phase to                                            permission for TimelinePI to access the various
affect process change,” he said. “Based on this                                               systems it needs to. Once a customer clears
information, I am going to make changes and                                                   those hurdles and gets their data in hand, it’s no
then monitor those changes. So, I am constantly                                               more than five minutes before they can see if
listening to my running system, and any time a                                                something is wrong with their processes.”
step is performed I figure out which process
instance that step applies to and recalculate my                                               Like ABBYY, TimelinePI has found traction
analytics. I can create definitions of specific                                               alongside RPA implementations. “We had a
patterns that might be interesting or check if                                                relationship with Blue Prism prior to being
certain rules are being followed. So, for                                                     acquired by ABBYY,” said Opitz. “RPA vendors
example, if I am querying a pattern and it                                                    and integrators like to bring us in because they
matches the rule, we let it go, but if it doesn’t,                                            want customers to do preassessments to give
then I send a notification. Those types of                                                    them a sense of what they should
monitoring capabilities don’t exist in anybody                                                automate—where they are going to achieve the
else’s product today.”                                                                        biggest savings in time or cost.”

  According to Opitz, the future of process                                                     Opitz concluded that the decision to sell
intelligence lies in being able to automatically                                              TimelinePI to ABBYY has helped accelerate the
invoke actions to fix sub-optimal processes. “In                                              organization’s growth. “We started selling our
addition to sending an alert, I am able to invoke                                             software in Q2 of last year,” he told    . “To this
action in another system,” he said. “So, if I                                                 point in 2019, we have seen significant YOY
detect a certain condition, it will trigger an                                                growth. We had some large deals lined up prior
action to fix it, like launching a robotic activity.                                          to the acquisition, but the short amount of time
And then I can use monitoring to ensure that the                                              we’ve been with ABBYY has driven a large spike
problem was really fixed. This should work with                                               in sales. We had built a good operation, but it
anything I can call with a Web service or send                                                would have taken us at least two years to have
an MQ series event to in real time.”                                                          anything considered to be a serious global
                                                                                              presence.”
  Capture intersects with process intelligence
when a document-centric process is involved.
“Some of the most important processes we deal                                                   To open his keynote, ABBYY CEO Ulf Persson
with are document-centric,” said Opitz. “These                                                stressed that ABBYY is “all about partners.” “We
include mortgage applications, insurance                                                      want to be an active part of an ecosystem that
claims, and onboarding. Many times, we are                                                    is thriving on diversity and collaboration,” he

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said.                                                                                         come in a few years. “Historically, we were an
                                                                                              OCR technology vendor that sat inside capture
 At the Content IQ Summit, we caught up with                                                  solutions and nobody really knew who we
Markus Pichler, VP for global partnerships and                                                were,” he said. “But since we’ve expanded our
alliances at ABBYY. “It is very important to have                                             marketing and our reach into the intelligent
support from the top, and over the next year, we                                              automation ecosystem, we are seeing big
will be increasing our focus on pushing business                                              enterprises telling partners that if they need to
through, and together with, partners,” he told                                                address documents, they want to use ABBYY.
    . “We feel this is opposite from the trend you                                            We are now seeing pull for our brand coming
are seeing in the rest of the industry.”                                                      from enterprises.”

  It was definitely interesting to see a lot of
partners at Content IQ Summit who have                                                         The evolution of ABBYY was evident in the
traditionally worked with other leading capture                                               attendance at the Content IQ Summit. Only six
vendors. “We see a lot of partners coming from                                                years ago, in 2013, I covered the first ABBYY
the competition that are now very interested in                                               partner conference, and it was attended by
working with us,” said Pichler. “They see we                                                  approximately 25 people, mostly ISV partners.
have a strategy and that we are looking to                                                    This year, several hundred people converged
innovate and expand our presence in the                                                       on Nashville—a combination of ISVs, resellers,
market, as well as our portfolio. A year ago, we                                              press and analysts, and more. ABBYY has plans
invited a lot of them to attend, and this year,                                               to keep expanding the event.
they really started to show up. They love to hear
us tell them we are going to focus on partners;                                                From a financial standpoint, Persson reported
now we have to implement that and live it.”                                                   that through the first nine months of 2019,
                                                                                              ABBYY’s growth was up 16-17% YOY, which he
  In addition to traditional document capture                                                 expected to rise to 17-20% before the end of
resellers, ABBYY has been pursuing partnerships                                               the year. This includes significant growth in the
with systems integrators that focus on the RPA                                                Asia-Pac market, which has helped expand
space. “Traditional capture partners still deliver                                            ABBYY’s global presence.
a significant portion of our business, but we have
also added a new category of reseller, which we                                                 ABBYY faces some challenges in the years
call intelligent automation partners,” said Pichler.                                          ahead. As we discussed, its OCR business
“These are typically big global systems                                                       could potentially be marginalized by services
integrators, as well as second-tier SIs that drive                                            offered by tech giants. Then, there is the RPA
RPA projects. They realize that when it comes to                                              market. There is no question that ABBYY’s
document processing, when they need to                                                        capture technology has been a key element in
introduce intelligence, we have the answers.”                                                 helping RPA vendors reach a level of cognitive
                                                                                              processing. But, if these vendors have to rely on
 Pichler said that both Vantage and TimelinePI                                                partners like ABBYY to provide cognitive
are good fits for these partners. “In addition,                                               services, what is their future growth path? The
TimelinePI brings its own set of partners who                                                 week of ABBYY’s conference, and just one week
focus on the process analytics market,” he said.                                              after its own multi-billion conference was held
                                                                                              in Las Vegas, it was reported that UiPath was
  Pichler said seeing how technology partners                                                 laying off several hundred employees or about
like UiPath handle their channels has helped                                                  11% of its workforce.
ABBYY adjust its program. “Starting in 2018,
we’ve added a lot of new partners,” he said.                                                   It seems like the RPA market that ABBYY has
“We’ve had to ramp up our support. In the past,                                               been so successful working in tandem with is at
partners would go to training and they’d be on                                                a bit of a crossroads. The keynote speaker at
their own. We started looking at how the RPA                                                  the Content IQ Summit was Craig LeClair of
vendors trained their partners and we saw they                                                Forrester, who recently wrote a book on RPA
had a lot of focus on enablement that we didn’t.                                              entitled
The biggest challenge with our newer intelligent                                                      . LeClair firmly believes RPA is going to
automation partners became, ‘how fast can we                                                  have a huge impact on our lives and the job
enable them?’ So, we set up programs for that.                                                market going forward. He just doesn’t believe
We changed internally how we train, educate,                                                  that current RPA offerings are anywhere near to
and support our partners. We are not quite all                                                fulfilling their potential.
the way there, but moving closer.”
  Pichler concluded by noting how far ABBYY has                                                 LeClair has a come up with what he calls a

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“rule of five” for today’s RPA applications. “They                                             replace humans and Automation Anywhere
work fine if you keep the number of decisions to                                               touts its ability to introduce more AI in its latest
less than five,” he said. “But once you extend                                                 extensible platform [see DIR 10/18/19]. But to us,
that, they start breaking down. There is no                                                    it still seems to be more of a message than a
decision management, and rules have to be                                                      reality.
hard-coded in scripts.”
                                                                                                 That said, ABBYY made it clear it is not married
  LeClair added, “Today’s RPA [which is at stage                                               to the RPA market. From the outset, its intelligent
1] is a crude tool with no native intelligence and                                             automation integration strategy has always
learning.” To reach its full potential [stage 3], he                                           included BPM. And its process intelligence
said RPA needs to be integrated with                                                           technology is applicable in multiple markets.
“conversational intelligence.” The integration of                                              ABBYY has done a great job emerging as a
ABBYY’s and other vendors’ document and                                                        leading capture vendor by increasing its focus
process intelligence technology is somewhere                                                   on traditional capture applications, as well as
between that and where we are today.                                                           looking at both complementary markets and
                                                                                               technologies to help it expand its breadth.
 We have certainly seen posturing from RPA
vendors about wanting to evolve past their                                                      For more information:
current utilization. Blue Prism has talked about                                               https://www.abbyy.com/en-us/content-iq-summit-nashville-2019/
creating digital “silicon-based” workers to

                                                                                              documents, including table data. Text Analyzer
  At its recent Ignite event, a Microsoft representative
                                                                                              offers natural language processing of raw text
joked that “we are bringing back the document
                                                                                              and is focused on four areas—sentiment
scanner,” while demoing a capture application. The
                                                                                              analysis, key phrase extraction, language
fact is (based on our infoSource numbers) the
                                                                                              detection, and entity recognition. Cortex
document scanner market has never gone away, it’s
                                                                                              capture is initially leveraging the entity
just that it’s currently being opened up to a whole new
                                                                                              recognition function.
type of customer—business analysts looking to
onboard documents into process automation
                                                                                               These services are being front-ended by AI
workflows. So, it’s no surprise that the scanner
                                                                                              Builder—an interface designed to make
Microsoft was demoing was the Fujitsu fi-7300NX—
                                                                                              Microsoft’s AI technology accessible and
which represents one of a new breed of network
                                                                                              applicable to content. In a demo we saw, a user
scanners we are seeing that enable tight integration
                                                                                              was able to build an extraction model for
with server and cloud-based apps like Office 365.
                                                                                              purchase orders by uploading a handful of PDFs
                                                                                              and JPEGs of similarly structured POs into
  Fujitsu Computer Products of America (FCPA) recently
                                                                                              Cortex. Form Recognizer automatically
showcased its new NX Technology (NXT) Partner
                                                                                              extracted paired value sets like “vendor name”
Program at its annual One Capture Alliance (OCA)
                                                                                              and the name of the vendor. The user could edit
event in Hawaii. “The program is designed to
                                                                                              the values they wanted to keep and then
embrace partners that may or may not be participants
                                                                                              upload the model into a SharePoint library. From
in the traditional ECM market,” said Bernie Schweiss,
                                                                                              that point on, every time a purchase order is
VP of Sales Business Development for FCPA. “Eight out
                                                                                              uploaded into that library, the defined data will
of 11 partners at OCA were demoing RPA or BPM and
                                                                                              be automatically extracted. The data can also
positioning our product as an on-ramp to their
                                                                                              be used to kick off a Power Automate workflow
solutions.”
                                                                                              (previously knowns as “Microsoft Flow,” which
                                                                                              was renamed at Ignite and also now offers RPA
  Fujitsu introduced the 7300NX last year. It features wi-
                                                                                              capabilities).
fi, Ethernet and USB connections. The network
connections can be used to connect to NX Manager a
                                                                                                There were some shortcomings in the initial
middleware that provides image processing,
                                                                                              implementation of Cortex capture. For example,
centralized scanner management and the ability to
                                                                                              if Form Recognizer does not extract a field, it
connect to third-party applications. The connections
                                                                                              can’t be added manually. Also, currently only
can be done as one-offs through an SDK, or Fujitsu
                                                                                              one model can be associated with a library, so
has packaged several of them in an Easy NX Connect
                                                                                              purchase orders with differing layouts would
package that is available for licensing from Fujitsu.
                                                                                              need to be put into a separate library for
The latest integrations, which were demoed at the
                                                                                              processing. These issues will not likely require
OCA event are with UiPath and Nintex.
                                                                                              major surgery to fix.

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The second demo we saw leveraged Text                                                      Azure database to create a file management
Analytics to extract a patient name from a                                                   system with less overhead than SharePoint.
correspondence document. In this example, the
Microsoft presenter, Sean Squires, a                                                          KnowledgeLake is bringing these services to
program/product manager, showed the                                                          market in partnership with Microsoft’s direct
incorporation of what he called “machine                                                     sales team.
teaching” in the creation of the document
model. “It’s not machine learning, which is
much more complex,” said Squires. “Machine                                                     Microsoft’s knowledge management initiative
teaching involves a subject matter expert                                                    is designed to summarize and surface
helping define what they want to extract or                                                  information about entities such as people,
how they want a document classified. This can                                                places, and projects. It has the ability to crawl
involve adding clues, like a keyword and                                                     through anything stored in Office 365 and
constructing an expression to help the computer                                              leverage AI to build a “topic page” about the
know where a field is going to live.”                                                        entity. This includes a summary page as well as
                                                                                             links to all documents about the topic and to
 Squires noted that the technology is evolving                                               people who would be considered experts.
beyond what he showed in the demo. “With                                                     Users are able to curate the page and make
Cortex, we are modernizing the management                                                    adjustments to it manually. Every time a topic is
of meta data,” he said. “We are adding AI to                                                 mentioned in Office 365 content, it will include a
what we already have to make the ingestion                                                   link to this topic page.
process smarter. We are giving users the power
to build reusable models, as well as tools to                                                 The initial use case, for which we saw a demo,
define and teach those models.”                                                              will be for organizing information on projects.

                                                                                                For more information:
 Obviously, what Microsoft has introduced with                                                  https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/project-cortex-microsoft-365/
Cortex is not the be all and end all when it
comes to capture in SharePoint and Office 365.
Microsoft partners have been building                                                          At Ignite, Reveille was showing its new
advanced capture integration into SharePoint                                                 integration with Microsoft Defender Advanced
for years and will continue to do so into the                                                Threat Protection (ATP), Microsoft’s security
future. KnowledgeLake, which pioneered the                                                   application for Office 365. Reveille specializes in
idea of using SharePoint as a document                                                       providing real-time and “active” insights into
imaging system back in the early ‘aughts, was                                                capture and ECM solutions. “For the past year,
at Ignite, showcasing its current cloud-based                                                we’ve been able to identify unusual behavior
suite of products.                                                                           within Office 365,” said Brian DeWyer, CTO of
                                                                                             Reveille Software. “For example, if someone
  Historically, KnowledgeLake had specialized in                                             from outside your network downloads 15
integration with SharePoint Server (on                                                       documents at midnight, we could make you
premises). In recent years, however, it began                                                aware of that. The integration with Defender
moving its technology to the cloud and offering                                              ATP will enable us to take action.”
integration with Office 365 (which incorporates
SharePoint Online). Last year, the St. Louis-                                                  Actions can escalate from sending a notice to
based ISV was acquired from PFU America by                                                   an admin, to triggering an anti-virus scan, to
an investment group led by one of its former                                                 freezing a desktop. “We can also isolate a
owners, Ron Cameron, who is now serving as                                                   machine and the final step would be disabling
CEO [see DIR 8/17/18]. This summer,                                                          it through Active Directory,” said DeWyer. “We
KnowledgeLake launched a new line of cloud-                                                  are now offering this for SharePoint and Office
based services.                                                                              365 through Defender ATP; we are also going to
                                                                                             be offering similar capabilities for OpenText
  These services are divided into three                                                      and Documentum repositories leveraging the
categories: capture, process, and content. The                                               EnCase security software their acquired with
capture service is machine learning and AI-                                                  Guidance.”
based. The process service facilitates
integration with third-party applications through                                             For more information:
the RPA technology KnowledgeLake acquired                                                    http://bit.ly/ReveilleMSDefender;
earlier this year [see DIR 2/1/19]. The content                                              http://bit.ly/ReveilleGuidance
service leverages Azure Blob Storage and an

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