Every year in early September, leading document capture analyst Harvey Spencer hosts an annual industry vendor conference at the Glen Cove Mansion in Glen Cove, NY.

Here, Harvey provides a synopsis of the document capture market, and IT trends as they relate to capture (think process-oriented applications, information security and governance, etc).

Here’s a few takeaways with some added commentary (these opinions are that of the author!):

Takeaway 1: Capture serves as an onroad to “Big Data” but it is still early.

Comments: Agree. And despite this author’s personal dislike of the marketization of the term “big data,” the fundamental point is that a lot of transactional information is still exchanged via paper. Or voice, video, picture, email, tweet, facebook, etc. To this degree, capture is an onramp to business process and is also uniquely positioned to support more business analytics; hence the big data tie-in.

Takeaway 2: The capture market grew 8% in 2012 and is slowing.

Comments: This points out a juxtposition that we found in our research with AIIM last year. Survey respondents suggested that the productivity gains from document capture automation would be substantial (upwards of 50%) however only 33% had adopted OCR, the most basic of recognition technologies. Changes in the market are likely holding up adoption. Primarily: 1) new channels (twitter, facebook) and the growing ad-hoc nature of existing channels (mobile, distributed) that need to be captured; and lack of integration with these channels, 2) growing end-user desire to move to OPEX pricing model vs making a capital investment and 3) increasing solution complexity required to satisfy all the needs of a capture deployment given #1 and #2 just mentioned.

Taken together this contributes to stagnant adoption; though this will likely shift as software providers advance their technologies in the coming months/years.

Takeaway 3: The Cloud is happening and is inevitable.

Comments: This is a no-brainer. However I don’t think it is as straightforward as “SaaS-ifying” existing software. It is helpful to service evolving applications and distributed capture needs, but it doesn’t, by itself, solve the solution complexity problem. Therefore moving to cloud doesn’t clear the capture growth log-jam. Look for innovation here. Some Parascript partners are using our new web-services functionality to deploy or augment their own SaaS solutions, and even that is just the beginning.

Bonus: Harvey is shifting his services to start looking at the “capture” market in general. No longer just document capture but also video, voice, image, and other content. I believe this is a wise move. So often one comes with the other (picture attached to a tweet). I am glad to see Harvey is spending more time with End Users and look forward to watching this evolving space.

If you have thoughts or opionins about the trends above, please share! Want a copy of the AIIM research referenced? Just click below: