Thursday 3rd April, 2014

by Maria Senge, Freelance IT journalist

Kofax's Transform 2014 conference – the annual get-together of Kofax's partners and customers - took place once again this year at San Diego's Hilton Bayfront Hotel and attracted over 700 delegates from around the world, including a fair contingent from the UK. Kofax, best known for its document capture products and solutions, has been on the acquisition trail over the past few years, so here was a great opportunity to get a better understanding and insight as to what lies behind their market moves.

On the first day, CEO Reynolds Bish began with a keynote speech outlining his vision of where the document management marketplace is heading and the strategy Kofax has adopted to “transform” itself from its capture roots to a provider of Smart Process Apps that “make the First Mile smarter”. The basic proposition is that companies that can provide their customers and prospects with a seamless integration between their customer-facing “systems of engagement” and their back office “systems of record” are going to be big winners in a market that is becoming increasingly mobile and where customers can switch allegiance at the click of a smartphone icon. Keynote speaker Lior Arussy from Strativity underlined this point with some telling examples of what's at stake when mishandling customer issues and the cost to a company of acquiring a new customer to replace one lost to the competition – around $5,000 in one of Lior's examples.

One new Kofax product showcased that is squarely aimed at the device-enabled customer was Mobile Capture 2.0 that can be used to submit images of documents into a business process either at the start or at any point in the process. This avoids all of the delays and potential errors associated with the back-office suspending a case file while waiting for additional input. Kofax has included a lot of smart technology into this mobile app to ensure high definition image quality, including correcting for camera skew, controlling the camera functions, even deciding when the picture should be taken. The image and its meta data are then automatically re-integrated back into the process flow, under the control of Kofax's BPM platform, TotalAgility (the new Version 7 release was on display at the conference).

In addition to Mobile Capture 2.0 and TotalAgility 7.0 BPM (created by the Derry, NI-based, software  team acquired when Kofax bought Singularity in 2011), the strategic fit behind Kofax's other recent acquisitions – Kapow and Altosoft - was explained. Kapow's Katalyst data integration platform enables rapid, non-coding, integration between First Mile smart process apps and existing big data resources, whether back-office or external web-based, while the Altosoft Insight 5.0 process-aware business intelligence package allows for the management oversight and control of the BPM solution.

So taking all of these together, the components and capabilities that Kofax has pieced together via their acquisitions over the last couple of years have all of the makings of a complete document management package that is well-suited to the customer-focused direction that the major corporations will have to go if they want to stay competitive with their upstart online rivals. This potential capability is a long way from Kofax's “capture” roots that was focused around document scanners and, like all acquisition-based strategies, the key to their (and their customers‘) success will be in Kofax's ability to integrate all of these powerful yet disparate components into a seamless solution that delivers on ROI, a point emphasised by another guest speaker, analyst Chris Marsh of the Yankee Group.

CEO Bish and his executive team have a challenging opportunity on their hands and, having taken the first steps along the First Mile, I can't wait until Transform 2015 to see how far Kofax has progressed in its journey.