Caere reorganization serves integrators

Caere Corp., Los Gatos, Calif., has reorganized its operations into two divisions that will market high-end imaging and desktop products separately.

Dean Hovey, the vice president and general manager of Caere's new Imaging Products Division, said the firm plans to promote its high-end, optical character recognition (OCR) technology to value-added resellers and integrators, including those in the federal market. Caere's OCR product line, built on technology acquired in a merger with Calera Recognition Systems in 1994, is used in a variety of government systems, including the Defense Department's Joint Continuous Acquisition and Life-Cycle Support program and the Internal Revenue Service's Document Processing System (DPS).

The company's new Desktop Products Division will focus on selling its OmniPage and WordScan desktop OCR software and OmniForm electronic forms software in the retail market. Hovey said, however, that the company envisions customers migrating from desktop to high-end imaging applications and that his imaging division would gain business from users who want to upgrade their systems.

In the federal market, Hovey said, top business opportunities include "creating solutions for recovering information off of forms."

In addition, Charles Montague, director of federal market development, said high-end OCR technology will play a role in digitizing paper documents for later full-text search and retrieval applications.

Tom Polivka, director of federal operations for Excalibur Technologies, said the new strategy will better enable Caere to pursue large-scale federal imaging projects. "There are a lot of applications out there—large-scale, scanning OCR image applications that are beyond the range of the PC OCR products that Caere made a name for themselves with," he said.

Excalibur uses Caere's OCR engine in its Electronic Filing System full-text indexing, search and retrieval software.

Caere announced its new business strategy at the Association for Information and Image Management trade show in Chicago earlier this month. In addition, the firm announced several new, high-end OCR products, including an OCR server for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT operating system, a compatible OCR engine, developers tools and an upgraded accelerator board.

Montague said the new products were requested by integrators and resellers, including Loral Corp., which holds the DPS contract.