Today's Captiva "intelligent capture" announce allows customers to put the full-court press on any document that tries to make its way into the enterprise. The announce describes even more ways to classify/identify document types using new services (e.g. .NET scripting, SOA Capture as a Service), as well as the traditional goodies (OCR/ICR, bar codes, check boxes, etc.)
What types of customers benefit from these features? Captiva supports a wide variety of industries, including insurance (claims), financial services (loan documents), healthcare (patient records), and government (tax documents).
There are many reasons for a customer to choose Captiva, but I've got my own personal favorite.
Captiva integrates with Documentum.
And Documentum integrates with Centera.
Captiva generates a large amount of metadata in an automated fashion. This metadata is associated with the original document and fed into Documentum.
As part of the workflow for the document, Documentum creates additional metadata.
The document now has a large amount of metadata coupled with the document. At the end of the document lifecycle both the document and the metadata tend to become fixed (unchanging). What product specializes in fixed content? Centera.
Customers have already deployed the trio of Captiva, Documentum and Centera. Here are the benefits that they are realizing.
Permanent Binding of Metadata to Documents
Centera is all about the permanent unity of metadata and documents. In fact, storing a document to Centera is a transaction that requires metadata to be sent as well. All of the metadata generated by Captiva and Documentum is permanently joined to the document by storing the whole bundle to Centera as one object. The document and metadata become inseparable.
Retention
Many of the industries listed above have compliance regulations when it comes to the length of time that the document (and its associated metadata) must be kept online. Centera's retention feature disallows the deletion of the document/meta-data combination. What if government regulations change and hundreds and millions of documents need to be kept for two years longer? No problem, use Centera's "retention classes" feature to quickly extend this length.
Authenticity
Along with retention requirements there are also authenticity requirements. How can an organization prove that the document (and its associated metadata) have not been tampered with? Centera intrinsically and automatically does this. When the object is stored to Centera a cryptographic hash is returned which not only uniquely identifies that object but serves as an authenticity check upon retrieval. When viewing a document and its metadata upon retrieval from a Centera, originality and authenticity are implied and guaranteed.
Massive Scalability
Centera can store hundreds and millions of objects in one flat address space. This offers a distinct advantage to storage administrators trying to manage separate databases and file systems. Enterprise customers are clearly bumping into this problem as they add huge amounts of metadata to their documents.
Capacity Upgrade Simplicity
As customers "fill the box" with enormous amounts of data they will inevitably reach capacity limits. The capacity upgrade of a Centera system involves the simple addition of new storage nodes. The storage administrator doesn't need to open up a management tool to "extend" or "grow" their configuration. It's a flat address space that doesn't need to receive these types of commands in order to store more objects.
Technology Refresh
It's likely that the documents and metadata will be kept for years, and the objects will need to "move" from older Centera hardware to newer hardware. Centera has always advertised the ability to perform technology refresh and migration of content onto new nodes. This migration can be done intra-cluster (add newer nodes to the same system and then remove the old) or between Centera clusters (set up a newer Centera and move all of the old objects off of the production system). A lot of Centera customers have been doing this lately (online) as the new Gen4 nodes not only contain more capacity but are also greener.
Technology Refresh
This important subject makes the list twice. Why? Because now that Centera supports the XAM standard, customers know that Centera objects can be exported from Centera and turned into XAM XSets. These XSets (which are an industry standard combination of metadata and documents) can then be imported into any XAM-compliant storage system (EMC, Sun, and HP demonstrated this capability in a plugfest last year).
That's A Lot of Value
Yup, I turned the Captiva announcement into a Centera post. Sorry 'bout that. Back to Captiva.
Captiva stands alone in its ability to capture the essence of enterprise documents and generate copious, rich metadata.
But you gotta put that stuff somewhere.....
Steve
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