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Business Trends on Converting Paper Processes to Electronic Format

In late November, at its AWS re:Invent conference,Amazon Web Services announced a number ofnew services based on machine learning. One ofthose was Amazon Textract, which some punditsare saying is going to kill the OCR industry.According to Amazon, Textract is a servicedesigned to “extract text and data from virtuallyany document.” This includes table and formsextraction and the ability to capture text in context.Textract also offers features like confidence levelfeedback. And the pricing is great. The servicestarts at .00015 cents per page for basic OCR, or$1.50 for 1,000 pages.

The technology being utilized seems to be acombination of an internally developed OCRengine and machine learning. Here’s whatAmazon has to say about it, “Amazon Textract isbased on the same proven, highly scalable, deeplearning technology developed by Amazon’scomputer vision scientists to analyze billions ofimages and videos daily…. includes simple, easy-to-use APIs that can analyze image files and PDFformatted files. Amazon Textract is always learningfrom new data, and we’re continually adding newfeatures to the service.”

Basically, it sounds like something similar to whatwe’ve discussed with Captricity, an ISV which hasutilized crowdsourced data entry and machinelearning to build an automated data captureengine [see DIR 9/7/18]. Some other vendors in ourmarket are using a similar approach to capture,although many are building their machine learningalgorithms on top of existing OCR engines andleveraging traditional character recognition in theequation. Regardless, I think it’s safe to say, after30-plus years of working with traditional OCR, wehave now entered the uncharted waters of OCR2.0 and Amazon is attempting to establish itself asone of the pioneers in this space. Google alsoseems to be treading into the water with its CloudVision technology, although I haven’t had a chance

The processor intensive nature ofdocument capture is one reason it hasbeen slower to move to the cloud thansome other applications such as ECM, inwhich the majority of files are going to beat rest. However, in some instances, thecloud can be the perfect answer for quicklyand temporarily ramping up processingwhen peak capture volumes hit. Ephesofthas created a solution designed to providethe best of both words—its CloudHyperExtender, an on-demand service thatcan be used to increase the performance ofexisting Transact capture implementations.

“We have customers that want to keepTransact on their own servers for normalvolumes, but they also want to be able totake care of peak periods without it costingthem an arm and a leg,” said Ike Kavas,founder and CEO of Ephesoft. “ThroughHyperExtender, they will be able to takeadvantage of the power and agility of thecloud.”

HyperExtender, which runs on a publiccloud, is designed to connect to an instanceof Transact running in a hosted environment(for maximum performance) like AWS orAzure or on a customers’ internal servers.Because of the microservices-orientedarchitecture of Ephesoft’s platform, theprocesses being run on HyperExtender canbe configured to suit a customer’srequirements and preferences. Forexample, a customer could choose just torun a processor-intensive step like OCR onHyperExtender. They can also choose whichtypes of documents they are comfortablesending to a public cloud.

to fully explore that yet.

Various elements of Textract are being made availablethrough a series of APIs. Initially, there is a DetectDocument Text API to access OCR functionality and twodifferent Analyze Document APIs, one for capturingtables and one for forms processing. Licensing the tableand forms processing APIs costs extra. The table modeis essentially $15 per 1,000 pages, with the forms modestarting at $65 per 1,000 pages. There are discountswhen you get over one million pages processed permonth. Textract is currently available in a “limitedpreview,” being hosted in a handful of sites designed toserve various U.S. regions.

The use cases that Amazon has presented are prettystandard document capture industry applications liketax forms and mortgage applications. On a morehorizontal level, Amazon presented search, compliance,and process automation as areas of application. It wasinteresting the way Amazon explained current capturetechnology available in the market. For example, OCRwas described as not being able to handle columns ortables and data extraction and forms capture wasdescribed as utilizing “complex rules and template-based extraction” and primarily able to handle“structured information at scale.” While there is sometruth to this, Amazon’s market analysis seemed a bitdated based on what we’ve seen in recent years.

After seeing headlines like “Amazon Textract has justkilled the OCR industry. Who’s next and who’s safe?”we decided to do a sanity check and talk to someexperts who might have a deeper understanding ofTextract’s effect on the market than some crackpotheadline writer. We tried to connect with the OCR SDKvendors, who most people think could potentially beaffected most by Textract, as well as capture vendorswho work on the AWS platform.

Of the SDK vendors, so far only ABBYY has responded.Bruce Orcutt, ABBYY’s VP of product marketing, offereda fairly forceful position on why Textract is not really athreat to traditional OCR SDKs. Following is the text of afairly detailed e-mail ABBYY sent to (with someediting related to flow):

“Having Amazon enter the space is encouraging andquite exciting as it gives more visibility and credibility toproblems that our customers are trying to address withtheir digital transformation strategies. [But] it appearsthat Amazon did not really evaluate the capabilities ofmodern commercial OCR technologies—as many of thechallenges or problems they associate with OCR havebeen solved for many years quite successfully bycommercially available products. I would speculatemuch of their assumptions about OCR were drawn fromevaluating open source products and not commercially

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Vol. 30, No. 2

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available engines.

“[For example,] they make some interestingassertions or claims about OCR systems beingtemplate-based, which is not true or accurate.While many structured forms historically havebeen processed by templates, over the past 10years, companies have leveraged machinelearning and trainable systems to learn andunderstand structure and content and how toaccurately extract information without the needfor templates. In fact, Amazon fell short of aviable answer for the most common documenttype processed by OCR technologies today,which is invoices. When pressed in their webinarabout processing invoices, the response was notvery confident or clear to the audience thatinvoices were a viable use case to beaddressed at this time.

“[In addition], during the webinar whereAmazon presented Textract, they were unclearabout processing tables that span multiplepages of a document. If this is true, Amazon issignificantly behind in their detection,understanding and processing of table data. Icannot imagine a production customeraccepting tables to be read page by page. Wehave to process tables that span multiple, if nothundreds, of pages.”

Orcutt goes on to say that Amazon is basicallypresenting use cases that have already beensolved. I agree with this, but, it’s probably worthpointing out that Amazon is offering itstechnology at a fraction of the cost of traditionalOCR and capture technology.

Orcutt said he also got the impression thatAmazon was at least somewhat positioningTextract against not just SDKs, but full-blowncapture solutions. “This is nonsense,” he said.“These applications were developed at the costof hundreds of man years of development. Thisis what creates real value for customers who arelooking for capture solutions.”

Orcutt then cuts to what may be the heart ofthe matter, saying, “OCR is not a core businessfor Amazon. Customers will have little influenceon the roadmap, and at any time, otherpriorities will prevail. [In contrast], ABBYY iscommitted to developing OCR, it has been ourbusiness for more than 20 years. That means weaddress the needs of our customers as timelyand best we can, and it is the reason wesupport many languages and platforms (cloud,Windows, Linux).”

To us, this point is reminiscent of Microsoft’sapproach to SharePoint as an ECM platform.Multiple times over the years, there have beenalarms sent out that SharePoint was going to killthe legacy ECM market. And, while SharePointhas had some success, quite frankly, it often hastrouble competing against platforms from morefocused ECM vendors who are constantlyupdating and improving their software. Bycontrast, Microsoft might come up with a bigECM refresh every five years [I hope Mike Alsupis not reading this], which is when we sendthose flares out.

Orcutt concluded that Amazon is not the firstnew entrant into the capture market in recentyears throwing around fancy terminology. “Overthe past two years, we have seen a number ofstart-ups emerge that claim to leverage ‘AI’ and‘machine learning’ to solve all problems:invoices, mortgages, claims, EOBs, etc. Thesestartups, while showing great marketingpromise, have struggled with the real worldchallenges that exist outside their labs and testbeds. Many times, these vendors have failed tounderstand the breadth of the problem that isbeing presented by users and customers. SinceAmazon is offering Textract as a service, I guesscustomers can try to resolve its shortcomingswith additional plug-ins or technologies, but thisadds a lot of cost related to development,support, and customizations when productioncapture companies have been solving this foryears.

“As innovators in OCR, ABBYY has beenadding deep learning technologies to itstechnology portfolio. Our products combine thebest of two worlds: machine and deep learning.In addition, our on-premises SDKs and platformsguarantee customers that their documents willstay on-premises.”

Most capture solution vendors do not seeTextract as a threat, but rather something theycould potentially leverage in their offerings. “Ithink Textract is going to compete primarily withcompanies offering technology rather thansolutions,” said Dan Dubiner, CTO of ScaleHub.“I think it could conceivably commoditize theOCR SDK business.”

ScaleHub is in an interesting position becauseit leverages Amazon Mechanical Turk in itscrowdsourcing data entry/completion/verification service. In fact, later this month, atthe IAOP OWS19 event in Orlando (Feb. 17-20),ScaleHub and Amazon will be presenting

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together on “Growing Your Business andMeeting Dynamic SLAs by LeveragingCrowdsourcing Technology.”

ScaleHub also leverages third-party OCR andcapture products for automated data entry andlicenses its crowdsourcing services to capturesolutions providers. Dubiner pointed out thatthe entry of Amazon and Google into thecapture market should, at the very least, spicethings up a bit. “Basically, you have two giantsentering into this competitive landscape andthey have a lot of funding and computingpower to invest,” he said. “If you are using alegacy OCR SDK and paying a few cents perpage, and now you have a worldwide playerthat is offering the same services with sufficientquality for a fraction of the cost, why wouldn’tyou consider it?

“At ScaleHub, we embrace new technology.From our standpoint, we believe these offeringsfrom Amazon and Google will encourage moreentities and enterprises to move to cloudcapture processes and potentially bring morebusiness our way, as a complementarymanaged services provider. These newproducts have the potential to drive the costs ofcapture down and the efficiency up. I think wewill start to see a transition in the market,especially among start-ups entering intocapture services.”

Ephesoft, which develops capture solutionsand leverages AWS in its cloud offerings, alsosees the introduction of Textract as a potentialbenefit rather than a threat. “Amazon’s Textractservice is good news for some and bad newsfor others,” noted Kevin Goulet, VP of productmanagement for Ephesoft. “It’s good news forcompanies like us that are innovating andtrying to solve problems in different ways thanwhat the ‘dinosaurs’ of our industry have beendoing for years—same old same old.

“Ephesoft, a patented and secure and fullstack on-prem and cloud capture platformdesigned for enterprise customers, isfundamentally different than Textract, whichsimply offers a consumer-grade OCR use case.Textract is a web service. A customer wouldhave to write and interpret code to use it—specifically, the customer would have to cobbletogether all the other elements of a captureplatform: import sources, image processing,classification/separation, validation/exceptionsprocessing and export to even begin toachieve the value Ephesoft offers in the market.

In addition, Amazon has stated they will utilizecustomer data to improve their product whichwill be a non-starter for most or potentially allenterprise customers.”

Goulet added that he views Amazon’sintroduction of Textract as another indicator ofan industry trend toward cloud services. “Therate at which enterprises are moving resourcesand data into the cloud continues toaccelerate,” he said. “If an enterprise isn’tmoving their data and systems to the cloud,they will be at a competitive disadvantage.This is a trend that favors innovators.”

The final capture solution provider wechecked in with on Textract was Captricity,which actually just changed its name toVidado. According to Nowell Outlaw, who tookover from founder Kuang Chen as CEO of theISV in July, Vidado means ‘vision’ in Esperanto.“The rebranding is to help us transition howpeople think about what they know about us,”Outlaw told . “We really are an AIcompany—a lot of people had associated uswith a pure capture style of vendor, e.g., wegot calls about needing scanners, etc.”

Outlaw looks at the launch of Textract asvalidation that Vidado, whose technology ishosted on AWS, has been going down the rightpath. “I know the team at Amazon that builtTextract ; it’s great,” he said. “It helps re-emphasize how digitization from paper can bedone with machine learning vs. traditional OCRmethods and how things can be improvedacross the board.”

He did not indicate that he feels that Textractis competitive with Vidado, which may havesomething to do with the company’s recentsuccess. According to a press release, thename change “builds on the company’sstrongest quarter in history (Q4 2018) andstrongest year overall in terms of financialperformance and customer acquisition.”Outlaw added, “We are doing a project rightnow requiring us to process 100 million pages,going back almost 100 years—it’s amazing tosee what an AI/machine learning approach canreally accomplish.”

Before we get too far ahead of ourselvesruminating on the potential of Textract, let’sremember that Vidado has been building itstechnology since it was founded in 2011. At thispoint, Textract is basically like a well-funded

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start-up just entering the capture industry. Doesit have disruptive potential? Certainly. Is it hardfor us to believe that Amazon will maintain focuson a market worth less than $1 billionworldwide? Affirmative, as well. But, even if theydo, we do not necessarily see it as the end ofthe world for legacy OCR engines.

This reminds me somewhat of when Googletook over sponsorship of the Tesseract opensource OCR code in the mid-2000s andeveryone thought that was a death knell forlegacy OCR engines. I remember Chris Rileyspeculating that you could write somevalidation code to supplement the Tesseractrecognition and achieve results that would begood enough for most applications. But, whileTesseract has some adoption in business usecases, it hasn’t been enough to make anoticeable dent in the traditional OCR market.

The cool thing about Textract is that it is nottraditional OCR. Rather, it embraces machinelearning and moves the ball forward towardsthis OCR 2.0 concept that seems to be emergingin the market. So, it has a chance to besomething new, better, and revolutionarycompared to what’s currently on the market.But, the bigger question may be, is OCR 2.0really going to be better than its predecessortechnology? I mean, there have been millions ofman years invested, by a lot of very smartpeople, in developing our legacy OCR engines.Shouldn’t we just be building on top of these?

Of course, maybe they just aren’t going to beefficient in new computing paradigms, such ascloud and mobile, going forward. If anyone is ina position to make a bet on the future oftechnology related to computing platforms, itmay be Amazon. I think it’s going to beimportant to keep an open mind on all this andcontinue to study this new recognitiontechnology as it comes down the pike, while atthe same time not discounting the legacy stuff,especially as the legacy vendors continue toimprove on it.

Ephesoft’s Goulet may have put it best whenhe stated, “Textract is bad news if you are notinnovating. If you have not innovated and that’snot in your culture, Amazon and Ephesoft [et al]will eat your lunch sooner than later.”

For more information:https://aws.amazon.com/textract/; http://bit.ly/VidadoCap

In our last issue, we predicted that an RPAcompany would be acquiring a capture vendor,or maybe vice-versa. Well, it turned out vice-versa came first, as last week, St. Louis-basedcapture and SharePoint integration specialistKnowledgeLake acquired RPA ISVRatchetSoft. The acquisition is the culminationof a partnership that dates back to 2012, whenKnowledgeLake started licensing Ratchet-Xunder an OEM agreement. Since then, it hasbeen bringing the product to market under theUnify label and used it toconnect with third-partyapplications in areas like ERP,accounting and CRM.

“When I was at ReadSoft, wewould always marvel at howKnowledgeLake was able touse SharePoint to image-enable so many lines ofbusiness,” said Bob Fresneda,who is now the VP of salesand marketing forKnowledgeLake. “KnowledgeLake was able totake its core capture piece and extract all thedetails and tables from an invoice, and thisdata would show up in the user’s accountingsystem, no matter what it was. Of course, wedidn’t realize they were utilizing RatchetSoft onthe back end.”

RatchetSoft has a long history in the RPAmarket. “Back in the early 2000s, when Webservices and SOA were all the rage, kind of likeRPA is today, we built a Web servicesmanagement platform,” said Joe Labbe,founder and CEO of RatchetSoft, who is nowthe VP of RPA at KnowledgeLake. “We sold abunch of implementations, but the marketwasn’t really ready for it because mostcompanies were afraid to open up theirexisting applications and SOA-enable them.

“In response to that problem, we created oneof the first attended bot platforms—we called itdesktop application integration. We created themechanics for taking existing applications andexposing their data. We translated anyapplication’s UI into an API so it could beintegrated into any process. We did thatthrough remoting technology, utilizing basicallywhat all RPA vendors use today. That was2005.”

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RatchetSoft proceeded to develop a specialtyniche focusing the ECM industry. “We realizedwe had a universal application adapter that wecould sell to everybody,” said Labbe, “but whenyou are a small company, you start to wonder,‘how do you sell to everybody?’ So, we startedthinking about various markets where ourtechnology would have a high value.

“I had been in the documentmanagement market in the1990s when I was a LaserData reseller, which waseventually acquired [LaserData itself was bought byKofax in 1995]. But, in 2007, Iunderstood the impact ourtechnology could have on theECM market where resellershave scenarios like the needto integrate with anaccounting system for which they don’t knowthe APIs and don’t want to take the time to learnbecause they may never need them again. Ourfocus on integrating with ECM was moreopportunistic than anything else.”

RatchetSoft’s Web page currently advertises“Action Packs” for ECM software fromLaserfiche, DocStar, Square 9, andFileBound. This is in addition to several OEMagreements the company has, similar to the onewith KnowledgeLake. “We have about 200active customers,” said Labbe. “About 65% ofthat is related to ECM applications. Wedistribute primarily through SIs and ISVs andplan to continue that business going forward.”

Ron Cameron, CEO of KnowledgeLake, saidthe strong relationship with RatchetSoftcontributed greatly to his motivation to acquirethe company. “We already have thousands ofdesktops running Ratchet-X and it worksperfectly,” he told . “Being able to interactwith all applications, which is basically whatRPA does, is something that has to be perfectedover time. The barrier to entry is not inventingthe technology itself, it’s being able to tune itover all those years. RatchetSoft has ahardened mature technology for connecting tomultiple different sources; it’s as good asanything I’ve seen.”

RatchetSoft started out with attended botsfocused on Windows applications, but hasexpanded to where it now offers both attendedand unattended bot technology and advertisesthe ability to connect with any application. “Wecan now connect to applications running

through Chrome and IE browsers, as well anygreen screen,” said Labbe. “I used to say wecould connect with ‘almost’ any app, but it hasbeen nine years since we’ve run into somethingwe couldn’t connect with.”

RatchetSoft’s customers also cover thespectrum in terms of size. “We have someenterprise, but also a number of mid-marketand even small-business customers,” saidLabbe. “Even though RPA is still considered a‘game of kings,’ that’s because a lot ofcompetitive products don’t scale down to meetthe needs of smaller businesses. We don’tnecessarily advertise our customers’ names alot because we believe if we are touching acustomer’s system through robotic means, theymight not want that known—it might beperceived as a weak link in their security. Thatmay hurt our marketing, but our customers comefirst.”

The goal of any acquisition is to make the sumgreater than the parts. Cameron perceives areal need for RPA technology amongKnowledgeLake’s customer base and seesRatchetSoft’s technology fitting nicely with themachine learning algorithms thatKnowledgeLake introduced into its platform lastyear. “There is certainly a lot of hype aroundthe RPA market,” Cameron told . “But that’snot what motivated me to make this acquisition.

“We have customers who have been askingwhat our RPA strategy is. There is a lot ofdemand in the market, and historically, we’vehad a good strategy with a partner calledRatchetSoft. I started talking to Joe last summer,not a lot about valuation, but really about howto best serve our customers. Now that we’vecompleted the acquisition, we are going to takethe integration richer and deeper. We think RPAcan take advantage of our machine learningcapabilities.”

Labbe shared with us his vision for the nextgeneration of ECM, incorporating RPA.“Historically the goal of documentmanagement software has been to getdocuments in a repository,” he said. “You mighthave some workflow before they get there, butthe end result was always the repository.KnowledgeLake’s story is that the final purposeof a document is really to fulfill a transaction. Todo that, you have to capture and manage thedata. KnowledgeLake has extractiontechnology and the data can be released to aprocess facilitated by RPA. I can envision an AI

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engine in between informing the RPA on what todo.”

Labbe added that the acquisition offers morethan just a technological fit. “Probably moreimportant is that the companies mesh well on ahuman level,” he said. “We’ve known eachother a long time and we like each other.”

Labbe sees the RPA market as riding a bit of abubble currently when it comes to valuationsand noted that it’s tough to compete withcompanies like Automation Anywhere andUiPath, who have each raised several hundredmillion in outside funding. “You can say whatyou want, but one reason RPA valuations are sohigh is because the technology delivers thegoods,” he said. “But, I really think to besuccessful going forward, RPA needs to befocused on verticals. I consider ECM to be avertical, but we have partners that specialize inareas like office furniture manufacturing andsales, which I wouldn’t have even thought of asbeing a market. Our partners know the ins andouts of that space, and the common problems,issues, and software applications that everyoneis dealing with.”

Fresneda noted that to date, due to its tightintegration with SharePoint, KnowledgeLake hashad a lot of success targeting IT buyers. “Wethink RPA can be very complementary to thecapture sales we make in that area,” he said.“Capture can fit into a lot of areas, but RPA iseven more versatile. We can let our IT buyersfigure out how they can best utilize it.

“In addition, along with our machine learningtechnology, RPA helps us get deeper into Azure.We are a Microsoft Preferred Partner for ContentServices, and SharePoint integration is animportant part of our business, but part of ourgrowth strategy is increasing the amount ofbusiness we are doing on Azure.”

In addition, the RatchetSoft acquisition willhelp KnowledgeLake with its goal of expandingits business to embrace additional ECMplatforms. This announcement is just thebeginning of the news we expect to be hearingout of KnowledgeLake this year. Between RPAand machine learning, KnowledgeLake hasadded two of the hottest technologies in themarket to its platform over the past 12 monthsand Cameron has assured us that they arepieces of a bigger picture being painted by theSt. Louis-based ISV. Stay tuned for more.

Read the PR: http://bit.ly/KLakeRatchetSoft

Konica Minolta continues to build out itsHyland OnBase ECM business. Its latestacquisition is the ECM practice ofThoughtTrace, a Houston, TX-based ISV thatfocuses on the oil and gas industry. Formerlyknown as Agile Upstream, Inc., ThoughtTracechanged its name last year to reflect a newfocus on AI and machine learning software forstreamlining contract management.

“The company had basically been operatingin two divisions,” said Les Walker, president ofECM at Konica Minolta Business Solutions,U.S.A. “As a Hyland reseller, they had successselling to companies that own oil rigs and havea lot of leased lands. They developed aframework in OnBase for managing data anddocuments around those agreements.

“A couple years ago, they set up a newdivision focused on contract managementleveraging AI and machine learning.Strategically, that is where they have put theirfocus. They raised some private equity and soldus the ECM business to further fund their newbusiness.”

Walker noted that the acquired businessmeets the attributes that Konica Minolta looksfor. “They are growing, their sales are strong,their services are OnBase-centric, and theyhave a vertical focus,” he said. “To date, I’d saytheir real focus has been large enterprises. It’snot uncommon for them to engage in projectsthat are delivered over several years.”

Walker sees an opportunity to bring thisvertical expertise downstream to KonicaMinolta’s current customer base. “Our directchannel has hundreds of existing customers inthe oil and gas space that could benefit,” hesaid.

Walker noted that ThoughtTrace’s three mostrecent large deals all included the HylandCloud. “We are seeing a trend of customerslooking to move their ECM to the cloud and thisbeing a motivating factor in their switching toHyland,” said Walker. “They figure if they aregoing to move to the cloud, they might as welltake a look at new technology. In all three ofthe recent ThoughtTrace deals, the customerswere already leveraging AWS or Azure forother applications, but still went with theHyland Cloud. I think that speaks very highly for

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the infrastructure that Hyland has built.”

The acquisition gives Konica Minolta its firstECM office in the U.S. southern region. “We aregoing to continue our acquisition strategy offocusing on OnBase resellers and BPOs, as wellas growing our geographic footprint,” saidWalker.

Walker noted that BPO services provide a nicebridge between Hyland’s core MFP businessand its burgeoning ECM practice. “Our directsales organization, they understand paper andscanning,” he said. “It’s more natural for them tolead with and have a discussion around BPOthan ECM.”

For more information: http://bit.ly/KMThoughtTrace

devices are designed to handle everythingfrom a receipt with a cheeseburger stain tolarger documents. The intuitive LCD touch panelcan help users manage their settings.”

The scanners include both TWAIN and ISISdrivers and Epson Document CaptureProsoftware, which features the ability to createsearchable PDFs and connect to variousback-end systems. They are being positionedagainst Fujitsu’s fi-7160 and fi-7180 models,which make up more than 70% of sales in thedepartmental segment. Epson is advertising itsmodels as faster, less expensive and moreversatile than their Fujitsu counterparts.

The DS-870 and DS-970 are available thismonth through authorized CapturePro resellers.

For more information: http://bit.ly/DS870-970

Over the past five years, Epson has firmlyestablished itself as the number two player inthe U.S. document scanner market in terms ofunits sold. The majority of this success hascome in the personal and workgroup segmentsas defined by InfoSource. This includesscanners rated at 35 ppm or less and pricedbelow $1,200. The latest release from EpsonAmerica is designed to give the vendor astronger offering the departmental segment(36-65 ppm, $1,200-$3,000), where Epsoncurrently ranks fourth.

The new DS-870 and DS-970 models are ratedat 65 ppm and 85 ppm and priced at $999 and$1,499, respectively. Epson is advertising themas faster “workgroup,” models, but positioningthem as an upgrade to its DS-860 series, a 65ppm unit that was introduced in 2014 and listsfor $999. New features include a larger 100-page ADF, a color LCD touch panel, support forMacs, an increased daily duty cycle, and awhite body design to help differentiate fromEpson’s consumer/SOHO models. Both modelsinclude Epson’s three-year warranty withadvance exchange and next business-dayreplacement.

“The new models really bring us into a newarea where we have not had a lot of success inthe past,” said Greg Newcomb, associateproduct manager at Epson America. “With the970, we’ve increased our speed andthroughput. We also know that scanners areutilized in a lot of different solutions and noteverything is a clean, 8 ½ x 11” page. These

“One thing we’ve learned over the years isthat one size does not fit all,” said Kavas. “Ican give you a real-life example of a customerwe are working with. Throughout the week,they receive about 100,000 records they needto process, which they are able to handle onpremises. But, on Fridays, they get a millionrecords that they want to have processed byMonday. Instead of having 10 servers onpremises just for that, they can send them toHyperExtender and have the results backwithin hours.”

Ephesoft advertises that HyperExtender hasthe ability to process up to 2,500 pages perminute—more than 10 times faster than astrictly on-premises version of Transact.

Kavas concluded that HyperExtender is justthe first of many cloud microservices andapplications that Ephesoft plans to makeavailable. “The cloud is a different beast,” saidKavas. “It’s like when Amazon opened as abook store. It was an Internet company from thestart. Barnes and Noble, on the other hand, wasbrick-and-mortar store that added a Web site.Either you are an Internet company or anInternet-enabled company. It’s the same withthe cloud. We have hired a great many peopleat Ephesoft, and they all have competency onthe cloud. The cloud is not something you justbuild into your product. You have to build it outfrom within.”

For more information:h�p://bit.ly/CloudHyperExtender