Technology convergence: forms, fax, OCR and pen.

Software crystal ball gazers (ourselves included) have a tendency to explore new technology trends in a vacuum, isolating our predictions from all other events that also could reshape the marketplace. But that's not how the real world works. It's often the convergence of technologies that produces the most important marketplace transitions. (Thus, the convergence of three apparently unconnected technologies-- graphical interfaces, laser printers, and object programming--yielded an entirely new phenomenon called desktop publishing.)

So what's the next big technology convergence? These things are brutally complicated to think about, but we're intrigued by a small acquisition that Delrina Technology just announced. Delrina, a modestly successful Canadian developer of forms processing and fax software ($3.5 million in sales), recently bought OCR Systems, a company that sells optical character recognition software ($2.5 million in sales). As part of the deal, Delrina also picked up the rights to some advanced neural network handwriting recognition technology that OCR funded.

Assuming Delrina can pull everything together into a commercial product, the combination of these four technologies--forms, fax, OCR, and pen-- has a certain irresistible logic. Paper and electronic forms are a universal medium for communicating structured information (Soft*letter, 6/11/90). Fax machines are increasingly popular as the physical medium for sending and receiving forms (for example, 70% of our own OpCon conference registrations now arrive by fax). And OCR and handwriting-recognition technologies clearly play a role in the transfer of data from paper forms to machine-readable formats.

Delrina's vision about technology synergism is based primarily on the notion of an intelligent forms processor, which can read and interpret handwritten or typed data according to pre-programmed rules and lookup tables. A forms processor like Delrina's Perform knows" what kind of input to expect field by field, so it can deduce that a barely legible "T**ont*" in an address field should be read as "Toronto". "Forms provide context", says Delrina president Mark Skapinker, "and context tremendously improves the accuracy of handwriting and character recognition."

To be sure, the idea of intelligent forms isn't unique to Delrina. Slate and other pen-based developers have also begun to exploit the synergism between forms structures and handwriting recognition. But Delrina adds an important linkage--fax-based communication. Earlier this year, Delrina shipped a windows product, Winfax, that sends and receives faxes directly from an internal fax modem, bypassing conventional fax hardware and scanners. Delrina's goal is to integrate its fax and recognition technologies into a hardware-independent solution--a software-only product that can intelligently read handwritten or typed forms straight off a fax transmission line.

The strength of this approach is that it represents a truly open system that accommodates virtually any kind of data that can be put on paper. We spoke recently with a friend in the Los Angeles school system who's trying to find a way to exchange academic transcript data with thousands of other school districts. Some schools store their transcript data on proprietary mainframe databases, some on PCs and Apple IIs, and some in old-fashioned file folders. Complete electronic data interchange-- especially for small schools--is probably an unrealistic goal. But it's not tough to imagine a Delrina-style solution that will let schools trade transcript data in whatever medium is most convenient: by fax, electronically, or even by mail.

And academic transcripts aren't an isolated example. In fact, a huge amount of manual effort already goes into copying data from paper forms--tax returns, bank checks, invoices, purchase orders, expense accounts, credit card slips, and the like--into machine-readable formats. This is boring, error-prone, expensive ($6 billion worth, according to Delrina) work, precisely the kind of application that's ideal for computer-based automation.

We don't pretend to know whether Delrina can actually deliver on this ambitious vision. And we don't really have a clear sense of how a forms-fax-OCR-pen technology convergence will play out in the marketplace. But we're pretty sure there's something here that, like desktop publishing, could have an impact on the whole software industry in the next decade.