Enterprise-Class Ascent Capture Reaches New High

Expected sometime in May, Ascent Capture 7.0 will boast enhanced enterprise-class strength and deliver a higher level of availability and fault tolerance. The upgrade also will make the platform easier for first-time users to navigate, said Anthony Macciola, senior vice president of development and marketing at Kofax, Irving, Calif.

"We have been [having] more success in the enterprise market, so it makes sense to add the levels of high availability and fault tolerance you would expect in a high-end IT solution," Macciola said.

Ascent Capture 6.0 already enables resellers to provide a high-speed image-capture platform for companies that process, digitize and store several million images a year.

Gwen Gaumond, systems engineer at Twinstar, an imaging and content management consultant in Denver, deployed Ascent Capture at a customer site that receives scans and processes 2.5 million checks a year. The software has saved the customer countless hours of manual data entry, she said.

In February, First Interstate Bank, Billings, Mont., deployed Ascent Capture to assist in processing hundreds of thousands of customer loan, mortgage and account documents coming in from its network of 58 branches.

Shad White, CTO of ImageSource, a systems integrator and Kofax Certified Solution Provider in Olympia, Wash., installed Ascent Capture at First Interstate's headquarters. Coupling Ascent Capture and Kofax's VirtualReScan technology with automated scanners from Fujitsu, ImageSource was able to reduce manual data-input and document-sorting requirements significantly, allowing First Interstate to reassign mailroom and accounting staff to more productive areas within the organization.

ImageSource's project managers are in the process of becoming certified on Ascent Capture 7.0, and opportunities are already in the pipeline for selling the new version to customers, White said. What separates Kofax from competitors such as Captiva Software is how aggressive Kofax is at keeping its technology on the cutting edge, he said.

"The usual model with vendors is you have sales ushering in new ideas from the field and then development trying to keep up. Not with Kofax. They have consistently evolved and outpaced the competition," White said. "And version 7.0 is moving to enterprise capabilities with [Microsoft] SQL Server, doing remote scanning, a whole range of technologies that five or six years ago I would have said simply aren't ready."

Kofax's technology also lends itself well to ImageSource's business model, which relies heavily on services and upselling.

"We are a core services company. Sixty percent of our revenue is services vs. hardware," White said. "And a lot of our growth in the last few quarters has been from new projects with existing customers. We really started last year to upsell our existing install base."

An upgrade from Ascent Capture 6.0 will give ImageSource a reason to revisit many of their existing customers. Kofax is an ideal fit for such a service-oriented plan because the products address a problem that doesn't require customers to have extensive knowledge of technology to understandthe problem of being inundated with paper documents, White said.

"Customers we talk to have specific pain points. So from a sales and marketing standpoint, we don't necessarily lead with technology. We lead with business process improvement. We don't start talking about vendors or technology up front," he said.

By engaging with customers and analyzing how best to deploy an imaging solution, ImageSource can usually bill for consulting before and after a Kofax platform is in place. This means lucrative income, and for ImageSource, an average job invoice is around half a million dollars, White said.