Comparing enterprise capture solutions from IBM and Oracle

David Jenness, Market Segment Manager for Document Imaging and Capture at IBM, looks at the difference between IBM and Oracle’s enterprise capture solutions.  Enter David:

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Smarter Question: How do I choose between IBM and Oracle’s enterprise capture solutions?

When I compare the products that IBM and Oracle offer for enterprise content management (ECM), I notice a striking omission on the Oracle side: Oracle offers only a basic scanning solution. That’s like buying a suit without pants. A car without the tires.  A swimming pool without water. The point is that something is missing.

Oracle makes it more complicated, when capture should be about making it simpler

If you want the ability to automatically identify documents, extract data for indexing and feed transactional data to line of business systems, Oracle recommends buying it from a third party.  That means to access all the benefits of advanced document capture, the Oracle customer has to develop a relationship with another vendor, go through another selection process, and wonder if the integration will deliver on the promise.

IBM puts capture front and center

IBM recognized that capture is too important to leave as an afterthought. In a move that signals the importance of capture to ECM, IBM recently released a new product called IBM Production Imaging Edition that includes advanced capture, storage, workflow and an interactive document viewer – all in one package.

For the very first time, an organization can make a single purchase and receive all the essential elements of intelligent imaging. Production Imaging Edition delivers automation throughout the entire life of a business document, whether it’s paper, image or electronic. All components are tightly integrated:

• Beginning with document capture in the mailroom or remotely in a branch office
• To departmental approvals with workflow
• On to interactive commentary on documents with the flexible viewer
• Then document storage in a content repository
• Where the document resides ready for rapid retrieval when needed
• Until the end of its business usefulness.

In a world where business and government organizations want to simplify their supply chain, this package makes it easy.

Use imaging to create less work (not more)

The dirty secret of the imaging industry has always been that most imaging systems actually create more work for organizations.  If scanned documents aren’t properly identified and indexed as they are entered into the repository, they cannot be located or distributed to knowledge workers who need access to the information on those documents. As a result, organizations that don’t automate capture need to staff data entry departments or outsource to support their imaging systems. And a shocking number of organizations still do it exactly that way.

Origins of Capture

When document capture software first appeared more than 20 years ago, along with a new generation of recognition engines and document scanners, solutions like Datacap Taskmaster Capture were immediately snapped up by best in class organizations in government, insurance and banking – all paper heavy occupations. And from those bastions of paper, the art and science of document capture developed and emerged.

More than just recognition – Capture includes document processing

Today’s capture systems have wrapped a slew of document processing technologies around the recognition (which has also improved significantly), and the best solutions can now handle a wide number of variables – absolutely essential, because documents can contain legal, business, property, rights, and strategic information and they all have to be handled differently.

New mission statement for capture

Develop highly scalable systems capable of handling document input from multiple locations, capturing documents from scanners, fax machines and email, and identifying documents based on their content using text analytics, and accurately extracting data for a several target systems: ERP, databases and ECM included.

Massive cost savings are the norm in capture

When you find a solution that delivers on the capture mission statement, buy it. You’ll get huge cost savings by eliminating manual data entry and document shipping costs. There’s the reduction of data entry errors, which cause all kinds of headaches downstream. And there’s improved customer service, since capture accelerates the input of documents to ECM systems and therefore makes them available more quickly to deliver a product or service faster or answer an inquiry during the initial support call.

I’d like to make a recommendation.  Try IBM for capture and then demand a lot from us. We’ll bring it.