FlexiCapture has its day at PegaWorld 2018

PegaWorld 2018 Conference in the Las Vegas has been variously billed as the world's largest intelligent automation event.  ‎Carl Hillier‎, ABBYY Product Group Head, was one of the plethora of innovators and business leaders in attendance. He shares his impressions with ABBYY Blog.

ABBYY has been working closely with Pega to help global clients across industries accelerate innovation and achieve transformative results. How far was this cooperation demonstrated at PegaWorld 2018?

PegaWorld was a very successful event for ABBYY and the discussions and presentations including OCR generated a lot of interest and traffic at the ABBYY booth, resulting in 100+ quality leads. Kerim Akgonul, Pega’s SVP of Products showcased the OCR on stage during one of the keynotes. This generated some confusion with the customers and Pega Sales personnel in the audience, as some were left with erroneous impression that Pega was natively capable of delivering FlexiCapture-like functionality. The key thing to bear in mind, however, is that what was shown in the above session was FineReader Engine providing full document OCR. What this provides is merely all the words contained in the document, but none of the structure. Pega freely owned up to this and subsequently directed customers to our booth when asked about use cases that went beyond what they showed on stage.

Do you see this incident impacting relations between both companies in future?

No. We are planning a variety of activities with Pega to both clear up any confusion and elevate the profile of what ABBYY is doing with the provision of the FlexiCapture Connector for Pega’s Platform and Robotics offerings.

If Pega has a proprietary OCR, why does it need ABBYY?

Pega provides OCR capabilities as part of Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Email and Pega Robotics. These implementations address very narrow specific use cases regarding Full Text OCR of documents and (in the case of Pega Robotics) screenshots. What their implementation provides is the words in the document or on the screen, but none of the structure. FlexiCapture, on the other hand, provides Content Intelligence, i.e. the application AI to the process of classification and extraction of the structured business data contained in these documents. The FlexiCapture Connector for Pega enables the seamless integration of the resulting structured data along with the captured document directly into objects within the Pega Platform, for use by Pega Applications and by Pega Robotics.

Does FlexiCapture integrate with Pega Robotics as well as the main Pega platform?

All customers that purchase Pega Robotics also receive the Pega Platform, which acts as a Management Infrastructure to manage Pega Robots. This means that the FlexiCapture Connector can integrate directly with Pega Robotics via the main Pega Platform.

Will FlexiCapture work with Pega's recently announced Pega Infinity platform?

The FlexiCapture Connector for Pega was developed using Pega’s standard APIs and will be tested against Pega Infinity once this is publicly available.

How much does the connector cost?

The Connector is an orderable component with no charge. We are in discussions with Pega regarding making it available as a download via the Pega Exchange. While the Connector does not have a charge, it does require a valid license for FlexiCapture. FlexiCapture licenses are normally based, in part, on the annual volume of documents processed.

How can our readers get additional information regarding this project?

We are scheduling a webinar on FlexiCapture and how it can be used in combination with Pega. This is planned for early July. Those who visited ABBYY booth at the conference should automatically receive invitations shortly. We are also working on some additional collateral, such as a data sheet and white paper, to be available shortly.

Photo by PegaWorld.