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The Document Imaging Scanner Market- Outlook and Overview

Introduction

The document scanner market in North America is always interesting to examine. It is a dynamic market, and we believe it will remain so, especially with increasing customer adoption of document management and the pursuit of the benefits of digital imaging.

We expect unit sales in North America to continue improving over the forecast period, demonstrating a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% for all segments combined. Most of this growth is forecasted in the Workgroup scanner segment due to increased adoption of distributed capture, and we will see some decline in growth as we go up-market to production scanners. The proportion of Workgroup scanners in the market will continue to increase, and will represent 81% of units sold by 2011.

Figure 1: North American Document Imaging Scanner
Shipments by Segment

InfoTrends’ new forecast, Document Imaging Scanner Forecast for North America: 2006 – 2011, examines the market trends impacting the document imaging scanner market. It covers 2005-2006 placements, revenues, and market share data, as well as projections for placements and revenues through 2011 for each of the 5 segments of the scanner market. Also reviewed are trends in product features and a market share evaluation for the top vendors in each segment.

Market Drivers

The document scanner market has shown significant year-over-year growth since InfoTrends began tracking it in 1995. The trends driving this growth include the adoption of distributed capture, compliance initiatives, and the pursuit of expense reduction by investing in improved document processing.

Imaging continues to be a focal point for many businesses as they streamline processes in the pursuit of growth, speed, and agility. Moreover, improved efficiencies lead to a competitive advantage and greater customer satisfaction.
Distributed scanning will continue to garner increasing interest in the near term, and this is where the majority of unit sales growth will come from. Distributed scanning provides several benefits to organizations: the units themselves are lower cost, the organization saves time and money by transporting documents to a centralized location, the risks of the documents being lost or compromised are reduced, and the digitized information is available to users much sooner.

Network scanners have also driven growth in this area. This sub-classification of network-connected scanners in the Departmental segment has experienced significant year-over-year growth and currently represents a substantial portion of the segment’s activity.

Figure 2: North American Document Imaging Scanner
Shipments – Network Scanner Sub-segment

Network scanners are primarily used for functions such as scan to e-mail, scan to network destination, scan to PDF, or scan to network fax. These functions are more similar to those of MFPs than operations performed using standalone scanners. This will affect the forecasted growth rate of this type of product.

Conclusion

Like all dynamic markets, the document imaging scanner market has undergone numerous changes. Products continue to evolve and vendors are continually introducing enhanced products to the market in an effort to make their products as relevant to customers as possible.

The strong growth that the market has seen in years past has slowed down somewhat. The lower segments have been affected by deferrals by some potential new customers as the technology continues to evolve from early-adopter status to mainstream adoption, while the upper segments have been impacted by the slow decline of the large quantities of paper-based documents that are important to vital business processes.

InfoTrends believes that this market will continue to show growth through the end of our current forecast period, and this is good news for vendors. We are confident that innovations in the scanner market will continue to attract new applications and customers, making this an interesting space that warrants watching for many years.

The preceding is an excerpt from InfoTrends’ reports entitled “Document Imaging Scanner Forecast for North America: 2006 – 2011.” To learn more about the reports or to make a purchase, visit our online store or contact Nicole Shown at +1 ext. 207 or .

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