Managed.IT - issue 60

18 01732 759725 DATA CAPTURE to integrate it with other line of business applications or to do repetitive tasks; and to use content management services to store, view and retrieve documents.” Easy scalability The fact that ibml Cloud Capture is a cloud-native solution, built using Microsoft Azure technologies, gives it an advantage over on-premise solutions that can be costly and time-consuming to scale up with additional servers and licences to cope with spikes in workload – investment that goes to waste when volumes return to normal. Susheel John adds that this applies equally to many cloud- based or cloud-hosted systems that were born in on-premise servers and moved to the cloud. “The reality is they can never be as agile as a cloud-native platform; they are not built to scale easily and the way they were born incurs lots of problems with infrastructure, configuration, maintenance, licences etc.. Being cloud-native, ibml Cloud Capture uses cloud native technologies, such as containerisation and Kubernetes, to scale very quickly in the cloud itself.” To highlight the benefits, Susheel John cites the example of mortgage applications, which can increase in volume by five or ten times in the summer months. “With an on-prem or cloud- hosted solution, customers would have to buy a solution based on those peak volumes. With a cloud- native solution, they don’t have to do that. We scale up automatically during those seasonal months and scale down automatically when the solution is not used as much. Customers only pay for the total number of documents they process through the year; they don’t need to build infrastructure just to handle those peak volumes,” he said. Susheel John adds that cloud- native solutions also deliver a faster ROI, as the cloud infrastructure is creating an integration nightmare, this creates more openings for security risks, higher service costs and more opportunities for error,” he said. Data capture family This complete offering, including robotic process automation (RPA) and content management services, also differentiates ibml Cloud Capture from the company’s existing data capture solutions. “We have two other software products within our portfolio: one is called ibml Capture Suite and the other is called ibml Synergetics,” explained Susheel. “Ibml Capture Suite is our inline intelligent mission-critical capture application, which connects to our intelligent scanners and extracts information from documents in-line, in real time during scanning. With that solution you can also process all that information and output it to a line of business application. But it is a completely on-prem solution and is mainly geared towards extracting data from structured documents. “Then we have ibml Synergetics, which is an unstructured capture solution and web-based, which means it runs on a browser even if it is mainly for customers to implement on-prem. They can access it through the browser and capture both structured and unstructured content. Neither of these solutions has process automation capabilities or content management capabilities,” he said. “Now, with ibml Cloud Capture, we have a completely cloud- native solution, born in the cloud and built in the cloud, for our customers to scale almost unlimitedly. It has those three capabilities: to capture content and extract content from structured to unstructured documents; to be able to use process automation High volume scanning and data capture specialist ibml has launched a cloud-native capture solution designed to meet the changing needs of customers facing a 4.5x increase in data volumes, the need to capture born- digital content and unpredictable data processing requirements due to changing regulations and seasonal peaks and troughs. The result of a technology partnership with US company KnowledgeLake, ibml Cloud Capture addresses the weaknesses of on-premise solutions and existing cloud solutions by giving customers a truly agile, all-in-one solution covering the three stages of document processing: 1 Capture . Intelligently capture content from any source – emails, attachments, Excel documents, office files, photos, smartphone images, faxes, scans from TWAIN- compatible scanners/MFPs – and automatically extract data from structured, semi-structured and unstructured documents; 2 Process . Use robotic process automation (RPA) to streamlines workflow automation and the integration of extracted data with line of business applications; and 3 Content services . Store, view and retrieve documents from multiple Microsoft applications and ECM solutions through one platform. For Susheel John, ibml vice president of marketing and strategy, ibml Cloud Capture’s ability to offer a total solution is a key point of differentiation with other cloud solutions that tend to address just one piece of the content lifecycle puzzle, which he says can create problems further down the line. “When companies can’t solve their problem with one platform, they are forced to string multiple platforms together. Besides More flexible data capture and processing ibml overcomes challenges of traditional data capture solutions with three-in-one cloud-native solution Susheel John