SIVECO Romania is one of the largest software integrators that can provide complete integrated solutions for electronic archiving.

The archiving solutions offered by SIVECO Romania have naturally evolved from the document management solution, by including niche products, in order to meet legal requirements for electronic archiving.

Radu Lazar, Customized Application & SIVADOC Deputy Head of Unit in SIVECO Romania, said: "We are working now to develop partnerships to provide digitization services for documents in physical form."

The legislation regarding electronic archiving in Romania, including Law 135 from 15th of May 2007 regarding the archiving of documents in electronic form can be improved, especially since we don't have yet the expertise in this domain. It is very important that authorities are open to suggestions from the market, in order to facilitate the use of electronic documents with legal value.

An electronic archive solution may include dedicated software solutions (archiving, document management, and workflows) as well as archiving services, various other software solutions (security, electronic signature, databases, etc) and hardware. Depending on the customers' needs it is possible to deliver all the components listed above or just a part of them. Hence there is a great variation in costs: between 100,000 Euros to 10 million for a complete solution that includes services for large organizations.

In the private sector we can't really talk about a conversion of existing physical documents into electronic documents. The trend is towards working with electronic documents and gradually abandon the physical ones, avoiding in this way the costs for digitization.

The electronic archiving market has evolved gradually, slower than the market for Document Management, for example. The largest contribution was brought by a few public organizations that invested large amounts of money in this kind of projects.

The market could be stimulated by the laws adopted in 2007-2008, but the same laws also restrict the market, because of the generating costs. The requirements that generate additional costs are a consequence of the need of assuring the same degree of security for electronic documents as for traditional ones. The market will really explode when the costs for physical archiving and working with physical documents will exceed the costs for electronic archiving. This will happen primarily in large organizations, so we can expect a rapid market growth in the next years.