Most of us in the Documentum world don't spend too much time thinking about Captiva. "It's Input Accel re-branded," is how one Documentum developer describes it. Another calls it, "Document Management .5. It's what companies used to scan paper in, stuff that wasn't created electronically." And that definition is good enough for a woman I interviewed six months ago; she got sick while searching through paper-based clinical study archives. "This stuff needs to be in the computer, not where it gets moldy," she says.

But EMC and Wikipedia see Captiva as something more than a tool that scans, stores and catalogs documents originally recorded on paper, electronically. Its larger value-add is......

realized when it first validates and applies business rules to the extracted content and files and then delivers it into Enterprise Content Management and ERP systems.

Ar EMC World 2008, EMC Software President Mark Lewis said that in Q3 of this year EMC will introduce advanced form capturing capabilities into Captiva, "with the ability to get more and more information from forms." In Q4 of this year, EMC plans to deliver Project Athena which will introduce a tighter integration between Captiva and Documentum.

Why does this matter? According to Lewis "We're (EMC) the only supplier in the industry with an end-to-end solution". Lewis is referring to Captiva on the front-end (Input), Documentum (Content Management) and Document Sciences (output). These three pieces are necessary for Transactional Content Management (TCM) where Content and Transactions are tightly intertwined. Note: Both Document Sciences product features and TCM  features will be discussed in later posts.

How does this affect jobs and the employers of ECM professionals is a question I'm always asked and feel behooved to answer. In terms of ECM jobs as a whole, provided that TCM takes off, job opportunities will grow as Transactional Content Management becomes an application that  companies choose to empower more and more business processes. And those who have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor will acquire in-demand skills first, and as at all times when the demand for qualified professionals exceeds the supply, they'll get paid more. But the roles will be different, partly because of EMC's new SOA and SaaS architectures, and partly because previously disparate EMC solutions will flow into each other thereby creating a demand for workers with a broader set of knowledge.

Finally, what does job growth look like for workers with Captiva experience? The chart below (which tracks the number of job listings containing the word "Captiva") comes to you courtesy of my friends at Indeed.com Needless to say, demand over the long-haul is growing.

captiva Job Trends

Scale: Absolute - Relative