IBM Datacap Reviews

With Datacap, use cases are really across the board. Accounts Payable seems to be a really popular use case in terms of invoices, but we do everything from insurance to financial services, to state and local government. The great thing about capture is that every company has documents they need to capture in some format, so use cases are pretty versatile.

For the customers we work with as a partner, a lot of times the solution is geared at introducing efficiencies for the mailroom. If you think about an insurance company, where they're getting a lot of paper coming in, they traditionally have to scan it and have someone sit there and key from that image. 

Datacap can take a document, maybe not having seen it before, and can classify it automatically. It can do OCR, extract all the data from it automatically. With it, they're really introducing real cost savings because the documents go straight through, don't have to be touched, handled as much, can go to the back-end systems more quickly. There is real efficiency that gets introduced through technologies like Datacap.

The user experience. One thing that IBM did a few years ago was they standardized all of their ECM products on Content Navigator, including Datacap. If you're an IBM ECM customer you have FileNet, you have Datacap, you have StoredIQ and you have a consistent user experience, user interface. It's all web-based. They moved to the cloud. They're doing things like containers. They've got a roadmap that's pretty "emerging" in terms of where they're going, that gives you that complete solution.

Reporting and analytics seem to often be something of an afterthought. With Datacap, they've started building out some dashboards, but one thing we hear from our clients a lot is, "Well, gee, we really love reports. What Datacap has is not really helpful. We'd like something better. We'd like more dashboards." That's one area where we've seen some feedback that the product could do better.

It's a stable product. We've seen other capture products on the market and our view of Datacap is that it's best-of-breed. It's a complete solution. It has its areas where it could improve, but it's reliable, it's scalable.

One of our largest clients, a large insurance company that you would know, they're ingesting 500,000 pages per day through Datacap, a really high volume. They've scaled it out to over a hundred servers, but that's the way it works. That's the design of the product: it can scale out as much as you can add servers to it.

The setup is getting better. IBM has introduced some more configuration wizards and the like. But what we always advise customers is, if you're just starting in with Datacap, bring in a partner like us to do the first one, because we've been working with this type of technology for many years. It's becoming easier to set up but you really want to work with someone who knows it, knows how to optimize it, knows what the best practices are to really make sure that you're getting the most ROI from the investment.

I think it is top of the market but there's always room to improve on it.

We use it for digitization and automation, meaning auto-classification of documents, boundary detection, and the flexibility of building a rules-based approach to building capture solutions. More importantly, we use it for extracting content from that data.

As a partner, 60 to 70 percent of the organizations we work with are in the financial industry: big banks and mortgage lenders. We find that we bring them a solution for separation of what they call "blob documents," large PDFs that contain anywhere between 100 and 200 document types. They want a solution to crawl through those documents, to break them apart, to understand the boundaries of the documents and identify them and, after that, to extract information from those documents.

The big thing these days is really the Insight Edition component and being able to build annotators to extract from literally unstructured content: paragraphs and information where there's no start anchor point to define where that data is located. There could be a number of entities in that which you have to draw information from. Being able to extract from them is really the differentiator today between this product and many of the other products like Kofax (KTM). ABBYY is one that provides something very similar, but it's not really known in the space yet.

I've always had my own gripes. Speed of OCR is one issue. It's a challenge because we have customers that have millions and millions of pages that they want this solution to crank through. In order to do that you have to have a large infrastructure in place, and that directly impacts licensing, based on the core count.

The user interfaces for exception processing can be tweaked. I commonly find that we try to tweak and customize some of those components to more of what the industry standard is. The product is still trying to play catch-up a little bit in those areas.

The stability all depends. I find that sometimes it's very stable, release after release, but I also find that sometimes you'll find bugs introduced, release after release. That's just something you just have to deal with, open a PMR to have them correct.

From a licensing standpoint, it's tailored for enterprises. It can be used for departmental purposes, but it might be overkill. It all depends on the use case. But it is enterprise, it is highly scalable with enterprise role-runners and by adding more hardware to the solution to generate more throughput of documents.

Tech support is knowledgeable. They've been quicker to respond than usual to my PMRs.

The installation and configuration are fairly simple. It's a standard install process, not overly complex. An argument across customers is that it is difficult to build solutions using IBM Datacap. I think they're continually trying to work on that. 

We also provide solution accelerators that we build on top of Datacap, to accelerate those processes so it's not as complex. That's one of the reasons why we hope that people come to our company, Imagine Solutions.

I rate Datacap at eight out of ten. I'm very versed in the product, I know it very well. It's very flexible. I like the flexibility because I have worked with other products that have more of a black-box approach. Datacap is not a black-box approach. You know what's occurring through that solution inside and out, and you can tweak it or tune it.

I rate it at eight, and not a nine or ten, because we constantly have the complexity, customers telling us this solution is complex, overall. We tend to train customers after implementations of a week to two weeks of our own guided training, but it really takes someone, hands-and-feet, working with this solution for quite some time to really grasp all the concepts. We implement complex solutions and, sometimes, it's not as easy for a customer to acquire that knowledge after our departure.

Our customers use the solution for scanning purposes. They scan the hard copies and send them across the DNS server at the backend using it.

The solution's best feature is scanning.

They should improve the customization feature of the solution. Also, they should work on its pricing.

We have been using the solution for seven years.

We have come across multiple site failure issues. Thus, they should work on making the solution stable. I rate its stability as a six.

The solution's scalability could be improved. I rate its scalability as a four.

The solution's customer service is good.

Neutral

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. I rate the process as a seven or eight. The deployment process takes a week to complete.

The solution's license is expensive for Asian and Middle Eastern regions. There are additional costs involved for installation and implementation.

I rate its pricing as a nine.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it as an eight. If its cost gets reduced, it will stand out as the best product in the market.

The solution helps us scan different documents and collect data from them.

The solution can be used to input data and track different items. IBM Datacap can be used in any organization that previously used hard copies of data. We can scan documents for information and input them into the software for tracking purposes.

The solution offers many features that are beneficial for customers.

I have been dealing with the solution for five years.

The solution is stable.

I give the scalability of the solution a six out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The deployment takes less than one day and requires one person.

The implementation was completed in-house.

There is a return on investment with the solution.

I give the solution a three out of ten.

We need to configure the actions based on our requirements, and if the actions are configured well, then we don't need to worry about anything else.

One person is required for the maintenance of the solution.