Overview on the Document Processing Software sub-sector in Israel

The main results of the research of this sub-sector are summarized in the following bullet points. The card for every company can be consulted through the excel database.

• The sub-sector is formed by 10 major players:

Docustar Dvir Software Products

Expert Ease ERA (Enhanced Recognition Algorithm)

Ligature Live Linx

Reach Cast Softel

Top Image Systems Wizcom

• There are two public companies: Top Image Systems (Nasdaq) and Wizcom (Neuer Mkt). Among the ones that are private, ERA, Ligature and Softel are subsidiaries of bigger conglomerates (Calera, Wizcom and IBM respectively)

• Under the “Document processing” umbrella, there are three distinctive activities:
• OCR- Optical Character Recognition. This ranges from hand held scanners to automatic data reading to damaged text reconstruction
• Data Mining- Automatic data search engines that extract critical data from legal or technical documents. Customer source for this type of applications are Banks, law firms…
• Multilingual applications- From word processing to multilingual OCR software to automatic translation

• Except for Docustar, whose activity is centered in the production of user’s guides, the rest of the sector is product oriented. All of them have developed, patented, manufactured and commercialized their own products.

• Like in the CAD/CAM case, most of the companies were created in the late 80s and very early 90s

• The most important markets for these companies are out of Israel. Two of the companies (Expert Ease and Reachcast) have their headquarters in the US, 4 more have at least commercial offices in different countries (mainly US) and Wizcom has a manufacturing facility in China. However, all of them have their development centers in Israel.

• As for the size of the companies we have only data for five of them. However, the number of employees of these companies is rather similar, ranging from 45 to 70.