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It is almost two years since Kofax acquired Singularity, and the intervening time has certainly not seen the capture giant resting on its laurels. In our March/April 2013 issue we spoke to CMO Martyn Christian following yet another acquisition, this one of analytics specialists AltoSoft. Even more recently, Big Data integration specialists Kapow also succumbed to Kofax's courtship ritual. Where will this buying spree lead? CTO Anthony Macciola gave Document Manager a sneak preview of the company's new TotalAgility 7.0 and explained how these disparate threads are coming together.

"There is no doubt that mobile is changing everything in the capture space", said Macciola. "The challenge - for us as suppliers and for end user organisations - is how to adapt, and more importantly, how to do it quickly". Historically as our readers will know, Kofax has focused on - and excelled at - enhancing the 'feed in' of business information to what we now tend to refer to as Systems of Record. Indeed this is what most of the traditional DM/ECM marketplace has focused on for much of its lifetime.

With the advent of what Forrester calls Multi-Channel Capture (or mobile capture to most of us), what we're seeing is not so much a moving of goalposts, as a whole new pitch laid out in front of us, as Macciola explains: "The focus is shifting from Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement, with the growth of BYOD and mobile computing driving demand from customers. The first part of the business process is becoming ever more critical - what we call the 'First Mile'. The challenge is how to reconcile these demands in a way that fits our customers' needs - and in a way that doesn't require expensive professional services costs on top!"

Enter the Smart Process Application or SPA, a new acronym that Kofax hopes will soon be on everyone's lips. According to Forrester, SPAs represent a new category of software that support business activities that are people intensive, often unpredictable, loosely structured, collaborative and subject to frequent change. Examples include new customer on-boarding applications such as account opening, loan applications, healthcare patient admissions and insurance claim submissions.

TotalAgility 7.0, says Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish, represents a single platform for building these new types of application: "Businesses must execute well in all phases of a business process but especially in the first stage of customer engagements, which we call the First Mile. Interactions in the First Mile are dynamic, information-intensive interactions and can be extremely inconvenient for customers to deal with and for businesses to manage. Kofax TotalAgility 7.0 addresses this challenge by giving businesses the tools needed to capture, process and analyse those interactions in a uniquely differentiated manner that's unlike any other product on the market today."

Kofax has plans to offer a selection of pre-built SPAs for common business requirements, including customer on-boarding, mortgage application, Accounts Payable (AP) and even mailroom automation. Anthony Macciola went on: "TotalAgility 7 exploits the Microsoft enterprise software stack and runs on Azure as a single instance or multi-tenancy. The fact that it is developed entirely using HTML5 means that our offerings have full mobile capabilities."

In addition, the acquisition of Altosoft earlier this year has brought Kofax new strengths in Business Intelligence (BI) and visualisation, giving TotalAgility the crucial monitoring, reporting and analytics tools that have been identified (again by the likes of Forrester) as central to the growth of the SPA market.

There can be no doubt that Kofax is investing a lot in the SPA concept, and the new TotalAgility release in October will see them hoping to make waves in the market.
More info: www.kofax.com