Industry analysts Harvey Spencer Associates (HSA) has released its 16th annual survey of the Worldwide Capture Software market, which showed an increase of 15.4% to $US4.7B in 2018. The increase was driven by the growth in Robotic Process Automation (RPA); a move to Cloud Services and an increasing need to understand and extract data from unstructured inputs at the time of impact.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based classification and extraction has started to make an impact on the market. HSA forecasts a further increase to 19.5% in 2019.

RPA, which has attracted a lot of interest from investors, has been one catalyst for a broader interest in Capture Technologies. Based on a capability to eliminate keystrokes and mouse movement, RPA is evolving into traditional forms processing capture with integration into business processes.

“This is the same trajectory as document capture took several years ago” observed Harvey Spencer.

The move towards value from ‘post-process’ to higher value ‘pre-process’ capture has been quite noticeable, with Case Management reported as “the reason to capture” increasing to be worth over $US1.5B. In contrast, revenue from Batch based back office capture, previously the largest area, decreased by -3.8% - the first decline seen by HSA in this segment.

Mobile based capture, driven by wider bandwidth and improved mobile phone cameras increased by more than 40% to account for nearly $US500M of revenue.

“It is now clear that we are seeing an inflection point in the market with increasing numbers of Capture 2.0 solutions. The reduction in batch back office capture combined with the increases in Mobile and Case Management demonstrates the need to understand incoming unstructured information as quickly as possible in order to improve efficiency and for competitive reasons.

“Records Management as a primary driver for Capture is becoming less important. The need is to truncate the information as fast as possible. The market is broadening as we also saw a substantial increase in revenues from developing countries, which we think is driven by the availability of smart phones and broadband” said Spencer.

HSA estimates the total market opportunity for Capture 2.0 Services at $US34B worldwide. Transformation to containerized Capture 2.0 services will have a far-reaching impact – resulting in double digit growth opportunities for vendors.