Datacap Inc., an Enterprise Content Management solution provider, acquired by IBM

ARMONK, N.Y., Aug 10, 2010 – IBM made an announcement that it has acquired Datacap Inc.,a leading software provides which helps enterprises to manage and automate business data flow in order to enhance business processes. The acquisition has strengthened IBM's capability to help organizations in digitizing, managing and automating their information, especially in industries like health care, government, insurance and finance where paper is used extensively. Additionally, rules like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley demand new standards and now legislation is inspiring the adoption of new records management solutions, including scanning and capture to extend precision, lower costs and speed business processes to meet these laws.

Customers of Datacap are some of the most visionary enterprises, using document capture and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions to transform their businesses. Around 200 clients across different industries are using Datacap software to help capture and manage their information.

Companies today are grappling with handling unstructured information while making an attempt to scale back costs simultaneously. It's estimated that 15 petabytes of new information is being generated daily, and eighty percent of this new data is unstructured content. By recognizing this challenge, Datacap software supports image and information entry automation for most varieties of documents and forms, including medical claims, tax estimates and highly variable documents like invoices and shipping documents for more accurate business outcomes.

As enterprises try to transform and clarify their business processes, extracting sensible information from unstructured content - both paper and electronic - is urgent. Datacap seriously speeds up this process by automating the conversion of both structured and highly variable formats - e-mail files, JPEG and GIF image files, and PowerPoint displays into actionable understanding in just a few seconds. This capacity, which accelerates the workflow of information throughout the organization by helping to get rid of the physical handling of information, makes it less complicated for small and medium enterprises, small departments or global enterprises to extract analytics quicker and transform their business processes.

For example, a rising number of accounts payable departments are receiving invoices not just on paper, but also through fax or as e-mail attachments. Now they can swiftly and reliably apply information extraction without the cost and work of printing and scanning documents. In addition, medical care suppliers looking to execute an electronic health record (EHR) system can replace ineffective manual processes for capturing pictures of medical claims, correspondence, medical reviews and enrollment forms with an automatic input system that improves precision, while reducing manual work. The facility to capture and store medical records, encounter forms, and lab leads to electronic form is a main factor in the modernizing of health care.

Datacap further extends IBM's sector leading set of solutions to help corporations take better decisions quickly by handling content, improving processes and enabling compliance through ECM solutions and sophisticated case management.

"Transforming the way organizations do business requires not only a powerful and flexible technology platform to accommodate the wide range of business requirements, challenges and goals, but also a deep understanding of the processes of the industries in which our clients operate," declared Ron Ercanbrack, VP of Enterprise Content Management for IBM. "We've chosen to make Datacap's approach the foundation of IBM's document capture strategy. Datacap's approach to image capture, using sophisticated business rules management, sets it above the rest in the industry and provides the most complementary capabilities for IBM."

“Datacap has developed the mainly advanced and flexible document capture platform on the market today. By teaming with IBM, we will at the present have the reach to satisfy customer demand around the globe," recounted Scott Blau, previous Chairman of Datacap and now Director of Corporation Content Management for IBM. “After fifteen years partnering with IBM, we'll hit the ground running with products that are tightly integrated into the IBM ECM offerings and can compete across the board in document capture."

IBM has an intention to combine Datacap with its ECM business, which is a part of IBM's Software Solutions Group.