Well it’s official…I guess you’re going to be hearing more from me over the coming months. I’ve been asked by AIIM to be a regular contributor to their blog forum. My name is Anthony Macciola and I’m currently the Chief Technology Officer for Kofax. I started with Kofax back in 1990 and during my tenure, I’ve had the good fortune to hold several key roles within the organization, including head of professional services, senior director of product management, VP of corporate marketing and EVP of engineering. As part of my role as CTO, I manage our advanced research team.
Prior to Kofax, I was instrumental in establishing its leading competitor at the time (Xionics, a UK-based firm) in the U.S. and Australian markets. All told, I’ve been in the document capture industry for just over 24 years. Prior to Xionics, I owned and managed a private consulting business focused on database development within the financial services sector throughout the greater Los Angeles area.
I entered the document imaging industry when it was in a fledgling state. As a result, I’ve been able to establish and maintain relationships with some of the key individual contributors and technology innovators who have helped initiate and mature the document imaging industry over the past 20 years.
I remember getting serial number 2 of Fujitsu’s first scanner into the production scanner market (the m3096). Back then, scanners were used as proprietary video interfaces as opposed to SCSI or USB. The first imaging systems where DOS-based since Windows wasn’t available in the market. Back then, document capture and document management was pretty much relegated to IBM’s and FileNet’s mainframe platforms. Kofax’s original claim to fame was allowing document capture, viewing, and printing to be extended to the standard PC environment of the time. This required dedicated image processing hardware to accelerate most (if not all) imaging functions due to the lack of performance available from the PC at the time.
Document capture initially began as a community of document imaging SDK providers selling through a network of document imaging ISVs, who in turn sold through their respective reseller networks. Over time, this ecosystem expanded to document capture product providers and solution providers bringing their offerings to market, either using a direct engagement model or through a certified document capture distribution and reseller ecosystem. I was fortunate enough to watch and participate as Kofax established broad-line distribution for document imaging products along with a robust and effective certified reseller network.
Up until the mid-to-late 1990s, document capture was pretty much relegated to high volume, centralized batch capture solutions. During that time period, I was responsible for conceptualizing, designing and bringing to market several industry-leading products, including Kofax’s KF-4100 product, Kofax’s Adrenaline family of hardware accelerators and software runtimes, and Kofax’s industry-leading ActiveX Document Capture SDK; ImageControls (just to name a few). In the latter part of the decade, I was instrumental in conceptualizing, designing and bringing to market Kofax’s award-winning VirtualReScan (VRS) product line which has dominated the market right from its inception. I am also one of two co-inventors and owners of the VRS Patent. At last count, the 10-year consolidated revenue generated by the products I’ve had the opportunity to bring to market (cradle to grave) has exceeded the $1B mark.
Fast forward to today, Kofax continues to make strides and inroads into the areas of document classification, metadata extraction, associative search, reverse entity matching and document separation. Our move into the area of Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) was based on a series of strategic technology acquisitions coupled with a significant amount of internal (organic) product development and advanced research. In my role as CTO and head of our advanced research, I’m responsible for the research and development of our intellectual property portfolio as it relates to advanced algorithm and technology development and patent development.
To date, Kofax dominates the automated image perfection market segment along with the production batch capture market segment. By the end of this year, we will most likely dominate the IDR market, and we are aggressively moving into the realm of document centric process automation and decision services.
As CTO, I have the unique opportunity to bridge evolving market dynamics, advanced research, and traditional product development. In my role, I’m afforded the opportunity to visit with, listen to and watch many customers trying to solve day-to-day problems as they relate to overall document management. I trust that my historical perspective of the industry, when coupled with my personal product successes and my view to ongoing market/customer dynamics, will allow me to provide insight you will find beneficial, engaging and illuminating.
I’d like to thank AIIM for the giving me the opportunity to participate in their blog and look forward to sharing my thoughts and insights with you in the days and weeks ahead.
#ScanningandCapture