Protecting Paper Assets Becomes Key

The image of paper documents floating across the New York skyline has awakened businesses to the realization that getting paper assets into electronic form for backup and recovery may be the only sure way to protect against disaster.

Solution providers say that over the past year there has been a discernable uptick of interest in document imaging and records management solutions. And the trend is being driven, at least in part, by the need for disaster-recovery and business-continuity strategies.

Interest in imaging solutions, once considered a relatively mature and slow-growing market, "has been on a bounce since September," said Ellen Reilly, vice president of Fujitsu Consulting, Edison, N.J. "Everybody wants to scan their paper."

While many insurers, mortgage lenders and financial institutions have long had imaging and workflow solutions, these solutions are now moving into second-tier adopters as well as across enterprises into areas such as accounts receivable.

"As you start going down and looking at the midsize companies, they're finding the impact of losing their documents is fairly significant," said Ken Chin, a Gartner analyst. "Those are the companies that have had less focus and fewer resources in the past to devote to this area."

Fujitsu Consulting recently landed a deal with a New York-based bank in the wholesale sector to scan all of its paper-based customer records, legal contracts, accounts receivable and other documents into an enterprise system. Reilly said the deal was unique in that it was enterprisewide rather than departmental.

"There were two driving factors: One was the cost of real estate, and the other was continuity issues," Reilly said. "We had a Japanese bank in here this week looking for the same thing."

Optical Laser, a distributor of document imaging hardware and software in Huntington Beach, Calif., changed its systems architecture following the events of Sept. 11, said Greg Sanner, vice president of professional services at the distributor.

"Whereas, before, someone might have put in one system for the database and storage server, now people are wanting to add clustering and redundancy," Sanner said. "Now they're looking for creative ways to duplicate storage . . . they're saying, 'We want it here and somewhere offline.' "

Enterprise content management vendors are also seeing the effect. IBM reported its content management group's sales were up 42 percent in the second quarter, while Documentum's and FileNet's revenue was up 17 percent and 19 percent, respectively.

Documentum is integrating records management and high-end imaging and scanning capabilities with the release this month of Documentum 5, its latest offering.

Mike Palmer, director of technology for Imagitek, League City, Texas, which builds vertical-market applications on the Documentum platform, said he thought Web content management integration would be the hot area a year ago, but Sept. 11 and the Enron fiasco have shifted customer priorities.

"You're seeing a resurgence of more classic document management and imaging front-end [applications and storage/retrieval-type applications," he said.

Illustration by Dave Winters for CRN.