P3iD to Demo TWAIN Direct Capture Platform

We’ve been writing about TWAIN Direct in DIR for more than four years now. It’s the driverless scanning initiative launched by the TWAIN Working Group (TWG) in 2013 designed to bring document scanning into the 21st century when it comes to connectivity [see DIR 12/20/13]. However, adoption of TWAIN Direct has faced a chicken-and-egg type of challenge. Scanner vendors seem to be waiting for software vendors to release applications that support TWAIN Direct before embedding the technology in their devices. Of course, if no scanners support TWAIN Direct, there isn’t much driving software vendors to create connections to it.
P3iD Technologies is attempting to break that cycle, and at the upcoming Harvey Spencer Associates Capture Conference, being held Sept. 5-6 in Long Island, NY, will demo a capture services platform that incorporates TWAIN Direct. “A standard like TWAIN Direct gets a lot of attention, but until companies start making commercially available products with it, you’re not going to see a lot of adoption,” said Kevin Neal, founder and CEO of P3iD. “We are taking a step forward to help advance the industry and the technology. As other companies build and release products that support TWAIN Direct, we will all be pushing the ball forward.”
We first profiled P3iD last year when it was known as P3iD Cloud [see DIR 9/22/17]. Since then, Neal has brought on former ABBYY VP and General Counsel LeighAnn Weiland to fill a similar role at P3iD and hired John Capurso as SVP of business development. Capurso is the former CEO of scanner vendor Visioneer and most recently served as Chief Technology Officer at Ambir. P3iD’s name has also been updated to reflect a broader focus.
“The platform we’ve created is an ecosystem that is a hybrid—in that it can run in different types of IT environments, whether those are on premises or in the cloud,” said Capurso. “It’s designed to take the products of different technology partners and weave them together into document and data solutions. That gives us the flexibility to find best-of-breed components. The platform is designed to be modular, extensible, and run on public or private clouds, or on premises.”
Current P3iD partners include XiiD, DocuFi, and APPO. XiiD is an identity management specialist that offers secure authentication to a corporate Active Directory. DocuFi offers a collection of imaging microservices for ad hoc transactional capture. APPO develops an enterprise blockchain application.
Capurso described what P3iD will be demoing at HSA Capture as “a reference platform.” “We can adjust and modify the platform based on an end user or partner’s needs,” said Capurso. “But, we wanted to have something fully functional to show. It’s harder to start from a blank sheet. It’s better to have something that you can make adjustments to.”
“There already are plenty of good capture technologies we can work with,” said Neal, “but all of them have certain deficiencies or weaknesses. We plan on augmenting participants in the P3iD ecosystem with security (Xiid), connectivity (TWAIN Direct), and new types of Blockchain application development (AlphaPoint). Working with our partners, we will offer capture in new and innovative ways that we’ve been talking about for a decade.”
Dating back to his days demoing applets that could be accessed through the touchscreen on Fujitsu network scanners, Neal has always tried to make advanced document scanning more accessible. “If you look at some of the stuff we were able to do with network scanners 10 years ago, I don’t think we’ve progressed since then,” he told DIR. “It’s sad that we have not moved forward as an industry.
“It’s time for us to come together and embrace standards like TWAIN Direct that will help everyone in the long run. It offers an easy way to integrate scanning, because it utilizes a standard Web architecture. A few lines of code is all you need, and you should be able to drive capture to the masses.”
P3iD will initially target hardware manufacturers and enterprise users with its platform. “If you are a scanner or MFP vendor, you are focused on hardware,” Capurso said. “We are offering a broad platform that can help these vendors address the build vs. buy question. Capture services are our reason for being. We have strong technology that we will be sharing in our reference platform, but if there is something else vendors want in there, we can do that.”
For more information: http://bit.ly/PD3iDTWG