EMC Refreshes Document Capture, Data De-Dupe, Backup Products

The slumping economy and cutbacks in IT spending aren't slowing down EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), which this week introduced upgrades to several of its product lines. They include new versions of Captiva InputAccel, Captiva Dispatcher, Data Protection Advisor, NetWorker, Avamar, and RecoverPoint.

EMC added a service-oriented architecture to its document capture products so companies can begin to use capture as a service and feed the data into other business processes and applications. While document capture and conversion is a mature market, many industries are still struggling to reduce their reliance on paper and the costs associated with the manual processing of paper forms and documents. Some estimates put the market for document capture software at around $1.5 billion annually, with growth topping 15 percent a year. EMC says it can cost up to $20 in labor to manually file a document and up to $120 to search for a misfiled document.

"With issues like compliance and the cost of labor becoming more important, a variety of industries are looking for ways to reduce the volume of paper they have to deal with. We are seeing growing interest in financial services, insurance, health care, and the government," said Sean Baird, a senior product marketing manager with EMC Captiva Products. He said departmental use has been common in the past, but that many companies are now looking for a system that can work through the enterprise.

The InputAccel software has been upgraded with configurable client interfaces and improved performance, scalability, and high availability, resulting in a 50 percent increase in throughput, EMC said. The company added new caching and multi-threading capabilities to make better use of multiple processors and boosted failover with support for Microsoft Active/Active clustering.

Dispatcher works with InputAccel to provide better document recognition by automatically identifying documents as they are captured and routing them based on rules and policies. It has improved classification capabilities and can handle less structured documents, the company said.EMC this week also upgraded several of its data protection products for backup, reporting, de-duplication, and replication. The company said it is trying to build on the momentum it has seen with more than 7,000 customers using its products to protect more than 1,500 Pbytes of data.

The upgrade to EMC Avamar backup and recovery software features source-based data de-duplication, enhanced security and capacity reporting capabilities, and easier management. EMC Data Protection Advisor, the new name for EMC Backup Advisor, includes proactive reporting and analysis and adds support for VMware and EMC's Celerra storage systems.

The refresh of EMC NetWorker is the first enterprise backup and recovery software to include support for Microsoft Hyper-V, the company said. It also provides easier management of VMware Infrastructure and better support for other EMC software and storage systems. And EMC RecoverPoint improves continuous data protection for advanced replication for a variety of storage arrays and includes support for VMware Site Recovery Manager and improved availability with Microsoft cluster integration.