Last year, multifunction printer giant Lexmark bought enterprise CMS vendor Perceptive for US$ 280 million. The idea was to move into the RCM space and expand the market for its MFPs. Perceptive has now announced the release of ModusOne, a document output management product.

Enterprise CMS Market

With this, it is likely that Lexmark through Perceptive will be able to embed itself even deeper into the enterprise CMS space as ModusOne is designed for companies that don’t have a license for its ImageNow product suite, which effectively makes up Perceptive’s flagship enterprise CMS product.

This means that, to sell this product, it is not depending on those who are already using ImageNow -- although obviously it works with that as well -- as it can provide scalable document output management to companies that are not under license.

It wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility to think that, once newbies had signed up for ModusOne, they wouldn’t be enticed to go the full ImageNow route, but that would also be underestimating what this product appears to be offering.

ModusOne, Document Output Management

First of all, it offers document creation and output (its not clear if this is the Lexmark touch) from multiple access points as well as the possibility of pre-populating templates for individualized documents for specific customers or brands.

It also ensures compliance, Perceptive says, by ensuring compliance in all customer-facing documents, while still allowing for that individual document development and manipulation.

Amongst the capabilities that come with ModusOne are:

  • Data Access: Access to multiple data sources, including ERP applications, Microsoft SQL, SharePoint ADO.Net, as well as ImageNow and other enterprise CMS systems
  • Document Creation: On-demand document generation and document batch processing with support for integrated document workflow, and document creation for different channels
  • Document Output: Multiple output channels and formats including fax, email and archiving as well as support for barcode/OMR generation
  • Document designer: A document designer using Word in text block design and document editing

Remember, as well, that Perceptive is also known for its business process products that the ModusOne will operate with them. The result is this functionality feeding into business process management products.

Perceptive also says that ModusOne closes a gap between high-volume standardized document creation processes associated with customer service and communication across a number of business areas.

Perceptive, Lexmark

ModusOne is the latest in a line of product releases and upgrades since Lexmark took over, although by appearances this is pure Perceptive.

One of those was Interact, a jointly developed Embedded Solutions Framework (eSF) application, which slots into some of Lexmark’s multifunction products (MFP) and linked the two companies tighter on a product level.

Perceptive in that year had also made it into Gartner’s Enterprise CMS Magic Quadrant, in the challenger’s quadrant, based largely on ImageNow’s integration and transactional content management.

ModusOne should help it in this respect as Perceptive pushes deeper into the enterprise CMS market. More from Perceptive when it happens.