Abbyy releases Vantage 2 and a new skills marketplace

Cognitive skills

That means skills that, in accounting departments, for example, automate handling invoices, purchase orders and receipts, said Bill Galusha, senior director of product marketing at Abbyy in an interview with TechTarget, March 18. For the transportation industry, the marketplace sells skills to help fill out and classify custom documents. Simultaneously, for financial services, some skills can handle documents for processing a loan, for example.

The marketplace "provides this way of accelerating adoption and usage advantage within an enterprise," Galusha said in an interview before the conference.

Abbyy relies on its natural language, optical character recognition (OCR) technology, as well as partners' technologies, notably robotic process automation (RPA) vendors UiPath and Blue Prism, and self-service analytics vendor Alteryx, to build its marketplace skills.

Founded in 1989 and specializing in OCR technology, Abbyy has for years relied on partnerships to help bring automation and intelligence to its software. The vendor maintains partnerships with numerous AI, analytics and RPA vendors.

Like the new marketplace, Abbyy's Vantage platform provides users with what it calls "cognitive skills" -- essentially automations and basic forms of AI that perform a complex set of tasks related to processing documents.

"That can be everything from digitizing a document to classifying what type of document it is, regardless if it's a fixed form or a semistructured document," Galusha said.

Easier coding

Vantage 2, the latest update to the Vantage platform, features a new low-code/no-code platform that aims to make it easier for business users to find, deploy and use pretrained models that can understand different types of documents, Galusha continued.

The simplified platform may not require data scientists to set up, but enterprises would need a DevOps team to integrate Abbyy's cognitive skills or microservices into their technology ecosystems, noted Holly Muscolino, research vice president of content and process strategies and the future of work at IDC.

[The new Abbyy products] open doors to new customers.

According to Abbyy, the platform can connect with other intelligent automation systems, including RPA and business process management (BPM) platforms and line-of-business applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

The new marketplace and Abbyy Vantage 2 "does open doors to new customers," Muscolino said.

To highlight the demand for platforms like Abbyy's, Muscolino pointed to a 2020 IDC survey of 608 decision-makers or influencers responsible for adopting or managing technology related to digitizing documents and intelligent document processing.

A third of the IT professionals said in the survey that they most often deployed in conjunction with their organization's intelligent document processing technology individual modules or cloud services they integrate themselves using connectors or APIs for specific applications.

Currently, Vantage 2 offers ready-to-use connectors for Alteryx, Blue Prism and UiPath, but Muscolino said she sees that group of vendors growing.

"The list will not be limited to RPA solutions," she said. "The capabilities that Vantage offers can be leveraged for any solution that requires access to the data locked in unstructured content for automation use cases."

Abbyy Reimagine is held March 23-24 virtually.