IBM has announced the acquisition of Datacap, a privately-held US company that creates software for the capture, management and automation of business information

The acquisition will add to IBM’s capacity to help organisations digitise, manage and automate their information assets, particularly in paper-intensive industries such as healthcare, insurance, government and finance.

IBM claims companies today are grappling with managing unstructured data while trying to reduce costs at the same time. It’s estimated that 15 petabytes of new information is being generated daily, and 80% of this new information is unstructured content.

Datacap software supports image and data entry automation for most types of documents and forms, including medical claims, tax returns and highly variable documents such as invoices and shipping documents for more precise business outcomes.

“Transforming the way organizations do business requires not only a powerful and flexible technology platform to accommodate the wide range of business requirements, challenges and goals, but also a deep understanding of the processes of the industries in which our clients operate,” said Ron Ercanbrack, VP of Enterprise Content Management for IBM.

“We’ve chosen to make Datacap’s approach the foundation of IBM’s document capture strategy. Datacap’s approach to image capture, using sophisticated business rules management, sets it above the rest in the industry and provides the most complementary capabilities for IBM.”

IBM intends to integrate Datacap within its ECM business, which is part of IBM’s Software Solutions Group.