The first fruits of the joint Eastman Kodak Co-Novell Inc venture were on display at a San Francisco developers conference last week and at first sight look impressive. Once again, Novell is touting NetWare as an environment for applications, the application in question being a set of highly complex imaging extensions to NetWare 3.2. When the companies talk of imaging, they mean document image processing – the technology which enables documents to be entered swiftly into and manipulated within computer systems as graphic representations, rather than laboriously re-keyed in or scanned. In an industry that realises that paper is here to stay, but wants to be able to retrieve documents such as cheques, contracts or hand-written forms quickly, document image processing is set to become a boom market. Imaging as a network phenomenon will be the next key data type says John Edwards, Novell’s vice-president of marketing – he places the current market at around $2,000m a year and says that this is growing at around 60% a year. The trend is being helped along by the decreasing costs of magnetic and optical storage which means that no longer are these systems solely the province of fancy minicomputer-based systems. Until recently, document processing hardware and software has been specialised for a particular application, making it difficult to move data between programs or around an organisation. What Novell and Kodak are attempting to do is create a de facto set of services based on NetWare 3.2 which will take some of the strain off application developers. Instead of having to re-invent the wheel, common document processing functions are implemented on the server through Kodak developed NetWare Loadable Modules. Developers will be able to use through application programming interfaces. The question remains, however, will Novell and Kodak actually be able to get support for the application programming interfaces they propose? Always a moot point, although Lotus Development Corp will apparently start beta testing an image-enabled version of its Notes workgroup software.Lotus has been working closely with the two imaging partners and it is worth remembering that Notes has been chosen by IBM Corp as a key part of its OfficeVision office application suite.
