Another feather in IBM’s cap

IBM has acquired Datacap, already well respected for its ability to capture, manage and automate the flow of business information to improve business processes, reduce paper costs or manual errors and meet compliance mandates. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The acquisition is said to strengthen IBM’s ability to help organizations digitize, manage and automate their information assets, particularly in paper-intensive industries such as healthcare, insurance, government and finance, making its solutions especially well suited for highly regulated industries. For example, regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley have demanded new standards, and now legislation is encouraging the adoption of new records management solutions, including scanning and capture to increase accuracy, lower costs and speed business processes to meet these regulations.

Datacap is widely recognized for speeding up the regulatory process by automating the conversion of both structured and highly variable formats—e-mail files, JPEG and GIF image files, as well as PowerPoint presentations—into actionable insight in seconds. This capability, which accelerates the dissemination of information throughout an organization by helping to eliminate the physical handling of information, makes it easier for small- to medium-sized businesses, small departments or global organizations to extract analytics faster and transform their business processes.

Datacap further extends IBM’s industry-leading set of solutions to help companies make better decisions faster by managing content, optimizing processes and enabling compliance through ECM solutions and advanced case management. Datacap’s client and partner investments in existing IBM and Datacap technologies will be preserved, allowing customers to take advantage of the broader set of capabilities without the need to replace existing systems.

IBM intends to integrate Datacap within its ECM business, which is part of IBM’s Software Solutions Group.