A largely cryptic news release from a relatively unknown (in the U.S.) firm, Cardiff, has won the company’s “data capture” business.

To quote the release: “Cardiff, a division of Autonomy Corporation and leading provider of intelligent document solutions, today announced that Pfizer, the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company, has signed an agreement to deploy Cardiff TeleForm v10.1 within the company for data capture. Cardiff’s agreement with Pfizer is based on software license and maintenance fees. Cardiff TeleForm can automatically classify, extract and validate a company’s data from any paper document or form type in order to improve its data accuracy, reduce operating costs and accelerate business processes.”

It’s not clear whether the Cardiff announcement will be used in clinical trial data. Pfizer’s current electronic data capture solution is RDC, an application developed with Oracle Clinical. The reluctance of other companies to embrace RDC has been a painful reality at Oracle for some time.

We’ve asked Cardiff for additional clarification.