Innovatech Corp, a San Diego-based imaging start-up, is finally coming out of the woodwork after a year of quietly distributing its system around at major customer sites. Major customers so far include Martin Marietta Corp, McDonnell Douglas Corp, Wells Fargo Bank, Pacific Gas & Electric, the US Air Force, the US Navy and Black & Decker Co where it has garnered users at perhaps 1,000 terminals. The cornerstone of its product strategy is DocWorx, described as distributed and scalable multisystem imaging software that captures and inputs, stores and manages, and retrieves and outputs images for individual, departmental and enterprise applications. Trident, the technology from which DocWorx derives, had its genesis years ago on a Trident nuclear bsubmarine and was beta-tested by the US Air Force. Unlike most imaging systems, it requires no proprietary hardware. Currently the system runs native on Sun Microsystems Inc workstations, Windows personal computers and Macintoshes and on Network File System and NetWare networks. TCP/IP, Ethernet, Banyan Systems Inc Vines and Token Ring are also supported.
Same look to all systems
LAN Manager support plus the ability to run under AIX, HP-UX and Ultrix are in development. DocWorx, whose interface was created using Open Look, Motif, Windows and the Mac, brings the same look to all systems. DocWorx uses SQL techniques to access relational databases, which currently include Oracle, Gupta, Ingres and Paradox. Gateways to Sybase and Informix are in development. It is claimed to track information stored anywhere on the network no matter how large the network is and decompresses the file at the retrieval station for speed. DocWorx consists of five components: DocWorx Control, DocWorx Client, DocWorx Out-put, DocWorx Storage and DocWorx Input. It includes an advanced graphical query system to search for information by key word or phrases. The OCR/ICR technology embedded in DocWorx can convert scanned text pages to ASCII format and users can search for any word or number on any page in the database. The software is al-so capable of automatic indexing and full-text editing. Images and documents can reside on multiple servers or jukeboxes, prov-iding for simultaneous multi-access. The company says its code is easily maintained because it’s small, only 150,000 lines, and can be customised without a programmer. Workflow-oriented, it routes and delivers work and primary images to users based on pre-determined steps and will download com-puter optical disks of mainframe files. It also offers file conversion to Interleaf, Framemaker and Xerox Corp ScanWorx. The company was founded by president Michael Bailey and includes vice-president, sales and marketing Thomas Anthony, who was previously with Altos Computer Systems Inc and co-ordinated its integration into Acer America. Anthony is a Unix pioneer, having been with Onyx Systems Inc, the first company to try to market Unix systems. Innovatech, which is making direct sales as well as OEM and value-added reseller channels, is expecting to do between $10m and $15m next year and is already internally funded. It also expects to have 100 value-added resellers signed at the end of next year. It has found the sales cycle is anywhere from three to eight months, relatively fast for a product that changes the way the customer works. Pricing runs from $5,000 stand-alone to $12,800 (1,600 per user) for an eight-person workgroup to $39,000 for a 20-user enterprise system. Strategic partners include Apple Computer Inc, Fujitsu Computer Products, Fulcrum Technologies Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co.
