A Conversation with ... Daniel Lucarini, Captaris

"The growth," he continues, "is coming largely from inbound fax, which is basically capture and imaging, going into a workflow. The market is made up of all those businesses that have to deal with large amounts of documentation, coming from outside the company, and outside the control of the company."

The second, also important, business driver is what's known as "the wet signature." "There are still business practices, such as loan origination in the mortgage industry, that are based on using a fax machine as the document capture point. There are legal practices in ALL industries where fax is still part of the process," says Dan. The activity Dan describes is known in some circles as "distributed capture." It's done through walk-up fax machines, multifunctional devices and, increasingly, via fax-over-IP (FoIP). And this is big business; as Dan says: "You gotta ask: Why are there so many distributed capture solutions if there's no paper??"

Good question.

But fax isn't the only story to tell about Captaris. Thanks to its other products— Captaris Workflow and Captaris Alchemy, an image scan/archive/retrieve tool—this company also has a seat at the e-discovery and regulatory compliance table.

A fax-based workflow and document capture system has some great advantages over email. For one, reliability. "Email's getting better, but firewalls and other things continue to get in the way," says Lucarini. "You can pretty much guarantee the certified delivery of a fax that goes into a fax server." And records control. "All of our customers use our products as part of their overall compliance process. We handle documents in a way that is manageable and auditable. Everything can be tracked. Documents are completely controlled in terms of who has access to them. They don't go over the Internet, so that's another level of secure control; everything can be archived, so compliance is automatically enforced," says Dan. On the sending side, people still use fax to send documents even though there are other ways to do it. "You can get certified delivery and notification that is rock-solid from a legal point of view. It's been proven over and over again," says Lucarini.

I've known Dan professionally for about as long as I've known anyone professionally. (Dan was in the audience of the "KM Summit", a KMWorld event we staged here in Camden in the earliest days of the knowledge management movement, which makes him one of the founders, in my opinion.) So as we wrapped up, I couldn't resist a little reminiscing. I reminded him that "back in the day," there was a lot of resistance to embracing the concept of knowledge management, particularly from some of the image capture guys.

"We were excited even then about how people were adding value to scan/archive/ retrieve. People are still trying to make sure their information is all connected, accessible and controlled—a new person coming to work today should have everything they need to know about their job at their fingertips—that's knowledge transfer."

He continues: "Those of us who have survived did so because we understood our purpose was not to make better imaging, indexing and retrieval. It was to make sure someone had a better healthcare experience. We realized the purpose was much higher; we just had to figure out how to make a growing, profitable business around that." So far, so good.