Technical FAQs

Periods of great disruption often have a way of presenting opportunities to companies willing to make the right investments in the future. That’s been especially true of the COVID-19 pandemic, which demonstrated that many organizations are, in fact, capable of implementing rapid and sweeping technology changes when they prioritize such initiatives. A survey of executives by McKinsey found that companies implemented significant digital transformations 20 to 25 times faster than expected, largely due to urgency and the removal of longstanding roadblocks. 

By undertaking major technology upgrades now, businesses can position themselves for future success before a new status quo settles in to stifle change. Companies would do well to focus their attention on a few potential areas where their applications could support digital transformation efforts with just a bit of customization.

The Great Remote Migration

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many organizations to rapidly implement the policies and technology necessary to support a remote working environment. Even though the vaccine rollout has made it possible for people to return to the physical office, not every company is rushing to bring everyone back. According to a survey of enterprise CEOs, 68 percent of large organizations are planning to downsize their office footprint and keep at least some portion of their workforce remote.

Although it no longer seems likely that remote work arrangements will completely replace traditional in-person offices, it does appear that the hybrid workforce is gaining popularity as the new normal for organizations. These workplaces will maintain a physical office presence while also incorporating a large number of remote employees. In some cases, these remote workers will be geographically distributed and never set foot in the office. This will allow companies to tap into broader talent pools from around the world. In other cases, employees will be given the option to work remotely under certain conditions, allowing them to decide when they have to actually travel to the office.

Both arrangements will present a number of challenges from a technology and a policy standpoint. In order to create a successful hybrid workplace, companies must continue to make investments in the digital document management technologies that make remote work possible. In addition to managing the myriad security challenges posed by remote employees, they also need to rethink how to handle documents now that passing paper for processing is not as simple as walking that paper document down the hall.  Developers can support the transition by focusing their efforts on building robust applications that can be accessed anywhere and can handle the viewing and processing of digitized documents.

Shifting Customer Expectations

Another major change coming out of the pandemic is the extent to which customers now expect brands to offer a better digital experience with their services. Not only do people use more digital services, but their expectations about how those services should respond to their needs also underwent a significant change. They expect services to be faster and less complicated, and their tolerance for experiences that fall short of those expectations will be lower than ever in the years to come.

Organizations that fail to invest in technology and applications that allow them to better address customer demands will find themselves falling behind in an increasingly competitive landscape. That creates tremendous opportunities for developers to build and market software that does a better job of creating a seamless link between companies and their end-users. That will include user experience features like better document viewing, more accurate data capture, and improved automation tools.

Developers are also under pressure to design innovative applications that can transform business processes and help companies get an edge over their competitors. Sophisticated features powered by machine learning and big data can provide valuable business intelligence and automate low-value tasks to boost productivity. To focus on those capabilities, developers will increasingly rely on third-party SDK and API solutions to deliver core functionality like viewing, conversion, annotation, and compression. By relying on proven, ready-made solutions, they can dedicate more time and resources to innovation.

Rethinking Document Lifecycle Technology

Even before the pandemic, organizations were trying to consolidate and simplify their technology infrastructure to eliminate unnecessary sprawl and software redundancies. Often referred to as application rationalization, this trend will undoubtedly continue as companies look to maximize efficiency to reduce costs while enhancing productivity. One business process that will certainly get a closer look is document lifecycle management.

Traditionally, companies have relied upon multiple software tools to handle the operations associated with each step of the document lifecycle. Common tasks like document scanning, form identification, data extraction, file conversion, viewing, and annotation could all be performed by distinct applications, forcing employees to constantly switch between programs and copy or move files in order to work with them. This process is not only grossly inefficient but also greatly increases the risk of human error or version confusion. 

Thanks to a new generation of SDK and API tools, developers can easily add new features to their software products that help to streamline and consolidate key elements of digital document lifecycles. From HTML5 viewing capabilities that make it easier to convert and open files within a web browser to more sophisticated data capture and document assembly tools that make true automation possible, these easy-to-implement integrations allow applications to carry out more essential workflow tasks without having to rely on external support.

Upgrading Your Application’s Potential with Accusoft

As organizations seize the opportunity to make essential technology upgrades, developers must be ready to provide them with the innovative applications capable of replacing legacy systems and keeping pace with customer expectations. Building software with the extensive functionality that companies require will continue to be a challenge for software teams facing budget and resource limitations. By turning to a partner with the right software integrations, they can quickly implement a wide spectrum of powerful features while keeping their own development efforts focused on designing best-in-class capabilities and bringing them to market quickly.

Accusoft’s collection of SDK and API solutions allows you to build a variety of powerful processing tools into your applications. Whether you need the conversion, viewing, and annotation features of PrizmDoc Viewer, the robust back-end processing capabilities of ImageGear, or the automated forms processing tools of the FormSuite Collection, our family of software integrations can help your application meet the varied needs of today’s companies. Learn more about our SDK and API solutions and explore how they can make your current project even more impressive.

Most software developers turn to third party integrations like Accusoft’s PrizmDoc to incorporate document processing capabilities into their applications. Since developers are frequently pressed for time and resources, it doesn’t make sense to build document lifecycle features from scratch when they can easily deploy a proven, scalable solution that provides all the tools they need. An API-based integration like PrizmDoc can quickly add industry-leading viewing, editing, collaboration, conversion, and assembly features to an application, which allows developers to focus on other features that will help their software stand out from competitors.

Pros and Cons of Server-Side Viewing

All that document processing power has to come from somewhere, and in the case of solutions like PrizmDoc, most processing is handled by a dedicated server. The server may be self-hosted on the developer’s local infrastructure, a dedicated private cloud, or a public cloud that’s shared by multiple customers.

There are plenty of advantages to this model. Scalable infrastructure is available for the heaviest document processing workloads, but customers only have to pay for the resources they actually use. A dedicated server also makes it easy for applications to manage document storage and avoid version confusion.

Server-side resources can also pose challenges for some applications. If the server is constantly being used to prepare and render documents for viewing, customers may find themselves utilizing more processing resources than expected. Scaling viewing capabilities for multiple users can increase resource usage because each session places additional processing requirements on the server, especially if users need to make annotations, redactions, or other alterations to files.

Viewing multiple, lengthy files server-side can also impact performance. PrizmDoc’s HTML5 viewer, for instance, converts and renders documents in SVG format. While this format offers outstanding quality and flexibility, load time may take longer and it also takes up server storage space.

Introducing PrizmDoc Hybrid Viewing

The new PrizmDoc Hybrid Viewing feature solves these challenges by offloading the processing work for viewing in PDF format to the end user’s device. This is a hybrid approach between server-side processing and client-side processing, with all of the viewing capabilities handled by the client-side device. This drastically reduces the server resources needed to prepare files for viewing, which translates into cost saving and improved performance. Since all viewing is handled by the browser on the client-side device, Hybrid Viewing offers much greater responsiveness for a better overall user experience.

For files not already in PDF format users can take advantage of the new viewing package which converts any file format to PDF. This not only allows documents to be viewed more quickly in the future, but also reduces server load and storage requirements.

5 Key Benefits of PrizmDoc Hybrid Viewing

The Hybrid Viewing feature works within PrizmDoc’s existing viewing package infrastructure, making it a simple and streamlined solution for both new and existing customers. Shifting viewing processing from the server to client-side devices provides applications with several important benefits.

1. Cost Savings

Transferring the processing work required for document viewing to an end user’s device reduces server workloads. Since customers pay for the server resources their applications utilize, minimizing server requirements for viewing can deliver significant cost savings over time.

2. Better Resource Management

All file types can be used with this new Hybrid Viewing feature. The new PDF viewing package pre-converts all file types into PDF only, rather than creating SVG files with large amounts of data. This saves both processing time and storage resources. Developers can take advantage of this flexibility and resource savings to implement additional application features that leverage PrizmDoc’s capabilities.

3. Increased Productivity

Shifting document viewing workloads to client-side devices allows applications to process, view, and manage multiple documents faster. This helps end users to do their jobs more efficiently and get greater value out of their applications.

4. Enhanced Performance

Hybrid viewing not only requires fewer resources, but files can be viewed and manipulated faster with enhanced responsiveness. For applications that need to provide editing features such as annotations, offloading processing to client-side devices minimizes load times and lag for a better overall user experience.

5. Scalable Document Viewing

By handling document viewing capabilities on local devices instead of the server, scaling capacity becomes far less resource intensive. File conversion only needs to be performed once, so adding more users doesn’t increase the overall server workload.

What Hybrid Viewing Means for PrizmDoc Users

The new Hybrid Viewing feature allows PrizmDoc users to get more out of their integration than ever before. For customers who have long relied on desktop-based PDF.js viewers due to concerns about server workload or performance, the Hybrid Viewing feature provides a localized viewing solution that streamlines their tech stack and leverages the full capabilities of PrizmDoc. By minimizing server requirements, developers can unlock the potential of their applications to scale their document lifecycle features without worrying of runaway costs.

Hybrid Viewing is available for PrizmDoc Server v13.15 or greater and can be used for self-hosted, private cloud-hosted, or public cloud-hosted deployments. To learn more about how it can provide the flexibility your application needs to scale with user demands, talk to one of our PrizmDoc specialists today.

For over 30 years, Accusoft has developed groundbreaking digital imaging technology that has revolutionized the way applications manage and process content. From high-resolution image compression and file format conversion to data extraction and barcode recognition, Accusoft technology can be found in some of the most sophisticated and widely used software in the world. The company’s enduring success is built upon a combination of patented engineering innovations and key strategic acquisitions.

Humble Beginnings and Early Success

The origins of Accusoft go back to the late 1980s, when founder and CEO Jack Berlin got a hands-on look at one of the first digital cameras at a trade show and developed an interest in the nascent technology.

“I just fell in love with it and wanted to get involved in digital imaging,” he recalls. That desire led Berlin to found Pegasus Imaging Corporation in September of 1991. “It started as a hobby, but it became serious pretty fast.”

The company quickly found its niche selling innovative image compression and decompression technology that software developers could incorporate into their applications. Over the next decade, Pegasus Imaging made a name for itself thanks to advancements in lossy and lossless JPEG compression that were adopted by leading photo imaging companies such as Kodak, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, and Konica Minolta.

In 1998, Pegasus Imaging expanded into medical imaging with the groundbreaking PICTools Medical SDK. The company quickly made a splash in the market by solving the infamous “DICOM bug” associated with the Cornell codec, an open-source codec frequently used for lossless JPEG compression. Pegasus Imaging’s engineers were able to identify why the codec rendered some images unreadable after decompression and provide a means of both compressing images safely and decompressing files once thought to be corrupted beyond repair. That ability to quickly solve imaging problems helped make PICTools Medical a major success with some of the world’s largest medical technology companies, including GE Healthcare, McKesson, Philips Medical Systems, Siemens Medical Solutions, and Toshiba.

Evolution and Expansion

Although Pegasus Imaging enjoyed a great deal of success in its first decade, Berlin knew the company needed to grow if it was going to retain a competitive edge in the 21st century.

“The challenge with the technology business is you have to improve it or lose it,” he says. “You don’t get to sell the same product ten years later. You have to continue to innovate.”

The early 2000s saw Pegasus Imaging embark on a series of acquisitions that helped expand its business and continue pushing the boundaries of innovating in digital imaging. Each merger involved a strategic consideration of how it would position the company to evolve to meet the complex challenges of the future.

“People typically want to buy growth, but we look at it differently,” Berlin says. “We’re a big believer that the reason to buy companies is their customers, their products, and their people. Products are worth nothing without their people.”

In 2004, Pegasus Imaging acquired TMSSequoia, which had developed the most sophisticated structured forms processing and document image cleanup technology in the world. The people behind that technology, however, proved even more valuable to the growing company, contributing to the development of several proprietary innovations over the years that followed. Their ongoing contributions can be seen in products like FormSuite, which remains an industry leader in forms processing technology.

The TMSSequoia acquisition, along with the development of its lightning fast ImagXpress toolkit, set Pegasus Imaging on the path to becoming a much bigger player in the document imaging market. Its next major acquisition came in 2008 with the purchase of AccuSoft, a Massachusetts-based imaging software company best known for its powerful ImageGear SDK. No sooner had the deal closed, then Pegasus Imaging expanded once again by acquiring the UK-based Tasman Software, which had developed groundbreaking barcode recognition technology that would eventually be incorporated into the popular Barcode Xpress SDK product.

Over the course of just a few years, Pegasus Imaging had greatly expanded its portfolio of document imaging and processing solutions by strategically identifying the technology and engineering talent that could fuel the company’s growth. To Berlin, making the most of those acquisition opportunities are critical to sustained success in a competitive industry:

“It’s grow or die. We’re up against larger and larger competitors. Consolidation gives you market share and economies of scale. If profitability goes up, you can invest in new product development, marketing, and growth.”

In 2009, Pegasus Imaging changed its name to Accusoft Pegasus to rebrand the company as a key player to watch in the document imaging and processing industry.

Integration and Innovation

The acquisition of AccuSoft expanded the company’s market share and expertise, but it also created a new challenge for the engineering team. AccuSoft’s ImageGear SDK frequently competed directly with Pegasus Imaging’s ImagXpress. While there was no question that the newly rebranded Accusoft Pegasus would continue to support customers using these products, strategic decisions had to be made about their respective futures.

As the team evaluated each product, it quickly became clear they were the result of very different approaches to software development.

“ImagXpress was much easier to use, but it didn’t have all the platforms and features of ImageGear,” Berlin recalls. “Their idea was to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the product, and if somebody complained, fix it. Pegasus wanted to make everything perfect and add features very slowly. I think there was a happy medium there somewhere.”

ImageGear’s ability to support multiple platforms and the rapid development of modern compilers eventually made it a more attractive SDK for developers, but the Accusoft Pegasus team incorporated the best features of ImagXpress into it to make ImageGear an even better product. Throughout the integration, the company put new processes into place to strike a balance between speed and perfection. Product management structures were also established to improve feedback loops, lay down feature roadmaps, and keep to development timelines without compromising quality.

All of these lessons would prove invaluable when Accusoft Pegasus acquired Adeptol in 2011 and added the company’s AJAX Document Viewer to its portfolio. While Adeptol’s browser-based viewing technology was undoubtedly innovative and correctly predicted what future web applications would require from viewing integrations, the product itself was Flash-based. In addition to being a proprietary technology, Flash contained multiple security vulnerabilities and was already on the decline by 2011.

The Accusoft Pegasus team got to work rebuilding the viewer using HTML5, making it much easier for developers to incorporate viewing features into web-based applications. As the new product took shape, it also allowed the company to expand into the growing market for cloud-based API integration products. Released as Prizm Content Connect in 2012, the HTML5 viewer would be rebranded in 2016 as PrizmDoc.

30 Years of Growth and Innovation

In 2012, Accusoft Pegasus rebranded once again to become Accusoft. Today, the company remains a pillar of the tech community in Tampa, FL even as it strives to expand its business globally. In 2021, Accusoft celebrated its 30th anniversary, a significant milestone for a privately held, employee-owned corporation that began as a hobby.

For Berlin, those humble origins and the long journey to success are what make a company like Accusoft special.

“It’s not just dollars and cents, but a sense of pride and competitiveness,” he says. “It stops being about money at some decimal point. It’s about the people and the legacy and seeing what you can do. We give back a lot to our community. I really enjoy that. We participate in our community, both in tech forums and charity drives and work days. If we cease being Accusoft or cease being Accusoft in Tampa, FL, that’s gone.”

Accusoft and Snowbound Join Forces

That same sense of pride and passion was shared by Simon Wieczner, President, CEO, and co-founder of Snowbound Software. Established in 1996, Snowbound first made a name for itself in the document imaging market with the RasterMaster conversion and imaging SDK. RasterMaster supports hundreds of formats and uses proprietary technology to quickly convert, archive, and display files in high resolution without loss of fidelity.

As two of the leading innovators in document imaging integrations, Snowbound and Accusoft routinely found themselves competing for the same customers over the years. “We were competitors, but not fierce competitors,” Wieczner recalls. “We would mostly run into each other at trade shows and talk about the market.”

Berlin first floated the idea of merging the two companies around 2015, but it wasn’t until much later that acquisition conversations turned serious. With so much money being invested in the tech industry over the previous decade, Snowbound had already received substantial interest from potential buyers, but most of the offers didn’t sit well with Wieczner.

“There’s been a craze over the last few years of growth equity companies looking for SDK companies,” he says. “They were offering good dollars, but without understanding our technology. So there was a little bit of distrust on my part. Some actually wanted to outsource everything and that would totally destroy the company.”

Many potential suitors were primarily interested in incorporating Snowbound’s technology into their own products rather than supporting existing customers and continuing to sell into the market. As conversations with Accusoft continued to progress, Wieczner realized that he’d already found the ideal acquisition partner.

“Accusoft understood the market, what our company did, and how we could fit together,” he says. “That’s why we felt ready to move on together.”

“Both Simon and I are passionate about the success of the company,” Berlin says. “It’s what small business people do. We tend to worship entrepreneurs that get in, build a shell, and get out with a billion dollars, but I don’t know if they’re fulfilled because there’s such fulfillment in seeing what you’ve built accomplish something.”

In late 2022, the companies moved ahead with a deal that saw Accusoft acquire Snowbound. The merger brings Snowbound’s RasterMaster^® and VirtualViewer^® products into the portfolio of Accusoft solutions:

• RasterMaster^®: A Java-based conversion and imaging SDK, RasterMaster can be incorporated into applications for all computing platforms, including Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac. The SDK supports hundreds of document types through its proprietary format library and provides a variety of document imaging tools, such as annotations, redactions, OCR, text extraction, and image cleanup.
• PrizmDoc^® for Java, formerly VirtualViewer^®: Developed to meet the demanding needs of the banking industry, PrizmDoc® for Java is an HTML5-based viewer that can be easily incorporated into web applications to allow users to view, annotate, and redact documents and images from any platform, anywhere. PrizmDoc® for Java’s library of APIs and out-of-the-box connectors for popular ECM applications (including Alfresco, IBM, and Pegasystems) make it a powerful tool for developers looking to quickly integrate advanced document workflow capabilities.

The Future

In keeping with Accusoft’s long history of strategic acquisitions, the Snowbound merger brings with it an influx of new customers, new technology, and new talent into the Accusoft family. Those resources will help the company to continue investing in innovation to compete in an increasingly high-stakes market.

“It’s a real challenge to incorporate other companies and take that risk, but they’ve done well with it,” Wieczner says. “We were deliberate in selecting an organization with a leadership team and product portfolio that would continue to grow, develop, and nurture what we have built at Snowbound.”

With three decades of experience and success to draw upon, Accusoft is better positioned than ever to meet the evolving needs of its customers and deliver a new generation of document imaging products powered by groundbreaking technology.

Banks are in no rush to bring workers back. While some had early plans to restart in-office work, the Wall Street Journal notes that even as Manhattan rushed to restart its physical financial framework, few staff have made the move. Meanwhile, financial firms like JP Morgan are putting return to work strategies on hold indefinitely as pandemic priorities evolve. 

The result is a realization that to generate revenue, firms must embrace digital banking initiatives, with no remote work roadmap that exists. This transition means going beyond simply sending staff home. It means creating a financial framework that addresses key challenges, acknowledges current trends, and embraces the next, new normal of digital banking transformation. 

Digital Banking Challenges: The Stay-at-Home Shift

As noted by The Financial Brand, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the urgency for digital banking transformation. But it’s one thing to recognize the gap between current outcomes and new expectations — it’s something else to apply solutions at scale.

Here, it’s critical for banks to avoid the knee-jerk reactions that often come with operational urgency and instead start with a focus on what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change. The old “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” adage applies here; spending on solutions that don’t solve specific problems will only widen the gap between pandemic problems and corporate performance.

To embrace the stay-at-home shift, banks must consider three key challenges:

• Communication – Nearly 70 percent of professionals say that the current pandemic has been the most stressful time of their career. Not only are staff worried about potential health problems, but they’re also concerned with juggling jobs and families simultaneously with little assurance of security. As a result, communication is critical. For banks, this includes regular team check-ins and staff meetings but also one-on-one conversations that aren’t about performance or productivity but instead prioritize mental health.
• Collaboration — While new video conferencing tools have empowered virtual face-to-face communication, they don’t always deliver workflow collaboration. Teams now need technology that empowers them to work together on loan processing, credit applications, and investment analysis at scale.
• Completion — There are so many tasks that are left in limbo due to paper processes. A form could be sitting on someone’s desk or in their email inbox for weeks before processing takes place. As result, applications get stalled and consumers have to wait. Banks need workflow automation tools that ensure critical tasks aren’t waiting for completion.

Digital Banking Trends: Mid-Pandemic Priorities

As firms respond to evolving client, stakeholder, and even regulatory expectations, it’s critical for firms to realize where digital banking trends are headed and what that means for their bottom line. As noted by Finextra, this starts with the digital banking experience. Research from McKinsey shows that customers who are satisfied with their current digital experience are 2.5 times more likely to open new accounts with their existing bank. This makes digital experience the new banking battlefield. If firms can meet (or exceed) consumer expectations around ease-of-use and data security, they can set the pace of pandemic performance rather than falling behind.

Banks must also embrace moving away from service-based applications to those that actively drive engagement. While transactional apps — such as those that allow customers to check their bank balance or perform simple payments and transfers — are now par for the course, clients who don’t feel comfortable visiting branches in person are now looking for customized and personalized digital banking experiences. This includes everything from the ability to easily connect with financial advisors to comprehensive investing and saving advice based on both historical data and likely outcomes.

For financial firms, tackling new trends requires the right IT framework. This means building out existing infrastructure to support everything from increased informational throughput to in-depth data analysis. In a world where digital client satisfaction can make-or-break financial futures, pre-pandemic platforms simply aren’t enough.

Digital Banking Transformation: The Next, New Normal

With return-to-office plans in limbo, some banks are now taking the next logical step and offering permanent work-from-home options, but as noted by Forbes, there’s a problem. Most banks still aren’t doing enough to embrace digital transformation at scale. 

When asked, 79 percent of business leaders defined digital transformation as the “integration of digital technologies into all areas, fundamentally changing how to operate and deliver value, and a culture change that continually challenges the status quo and gets comfortable with failure.” But despite the widespread impact of current COVID concerns, many banks remain on a digital path that prioritizes incremental change, not complete transformation. Backed by legacy tools and aging apps, however, simply adding small services to existing stacks won’t be enough to support the next, new normal of stay-at-home staffing. 

To drive meaningful, substantive change across organizational operations, banks must prioritize three transformative functions:

• Document Management – Firms are suddenly dealing with a deluge of document formats and file types that must be handled by geographically disparate staff. Time spent searching for conversion, annotation, redaction, and editing tools is wastes time. Agile, adaptable document management tools that deliver end-to-end capabilities are now critical.
• Solution Security — Banks must comply with regulations that mandate consumer data security and process compliance. FinTech applications must provide secure ways for departments to collaborate on sensitive documents while also maintaining security and abiding by industry regulations. By integrating a document viewer inside the application itself, financial institutions are able to programmatically restrict downloading of sensitive documents.
• Trackable Collaboration — Staff need the ability to quickly locate and remedy process problems. This is especially critical as the volume of digital documents ramps up over time. Bank employees must be able to find, fix, and finish tasks efficiently. 

A New, Flexible Roadmap for Digital Banking

While there’s no perfect roadmap for digital banking transformation in the age of COVID-19, however, the first step is obvious. Embrace the realities of work-from-home. Many banks are distracted with incremental change and stuck in pre-pandemic thought processes, hoping the pandemic will end and things will go back to normal. As with every major world event, the world is going to be different after COVID. 

Banks must prepare for this change and  embrace true evolution. Banks must start by articulating the challenges of remote work, acknowledging the evolving expectations of mid-pandemic trends, and addressing the need for transformative technological change.