Forms processing firm TextWare Corp is looking to turn itself into a big company and establish itself as a clear market leader by merging with character recognition company Symbus Technology Inc. The two will become one under the name of FormWare Corp, after Textware’s electronic character recognition software of the same name, and will be headquartered in Park City, Utah. TextWare president Reynolds Bish said forms processing has traditionally been catered for by an increasing number of small companies, which, he says, lack the resources to stay current with rapidly changing technologies and extend their influence beyond narrow market niches. This, he says, is why the market has been starved for growth, and why no one company has emerged as the market leader. The new FormWare company will have an installed base of some 25,000 users, and is aiming for the number one slot by riding the crest of what it sees as a wave of transition in the market. TextWare products enable documents to be keyed in from paper, keying from scanned images and electronic recognition and data verification and repair. Symbus InScript product uses neural networks for intelligent character recognition, and also offers image pre-processing and forms identification. TextWare says there are a number of factors that are creating huge opportunities in this market. The traditional players have been hardware manufacturers, with proprietary scanning and optical recognition products, which the company says are accurate but expensive and restricting. It reckons that over time, these will disappear and be replaced by the more open, software-based systems. Secondly, more and more forms are being automated among major forms producers such as insurance companies and the Inland Revenue, thus increasing the market potential for the company’s software. Then there is the ever-emerging document imaging market. Textware spokesman Harvey Spencer says that in the past, it wasnt economical for companies to scan forms into the system just for data processing purposes, but with the emergence of optical data storage and retrieval, where forms are kept on disk for easy retrieval to furnish all sorts of customer-focused systems, the costs of scanning are lost in the overall process. Scanning therefore becomes viable for data processing. A further spin-off from document imaging is the need to index all the data being input, which could involve vast amounts of manual keying. FormWares software can automate this process as well, says Spencer. He admits that in order to fight its way to significant market share, the new company has a major challenge on its hands, but he believes the time is propitious. A lot of small companies have grown large on the back of the right technology, he says, and FormWare hopes to catch the wave and ride it.
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