J&B Acquisition

Payment/remittance processing specialist J&B Software, out of Bala Cynwood, PA was recently acquired by India-based software and services provider 3i Infotech. According to a J&B press release, 3i has $300 million in annual revenue. According to 3i's latest financial report, 31% of the compay's business last quarter was in India, 25% in the U.S., with Western Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia Pacific combining fo the remaining 44%.

J&B was founded by Indian-native Bala Balasubramanian, who resigned from the company following the completion of the acquistion.

One thing we will keep an eye on is the relationship between 3i and document and data capture specialist Top Image Systems (TIS). From all accounts, TIS and J&B had been executing fairly successfully on a recently formed partnerhip, which we expect to continue through the acquisition. Looking forther down the road, both TIS and 3i have global ambitions and global infrastructures. We suspect these shared visions could lead to an even tighter relationship.

Cheers.

Ralph

Lawsuits Down

Using a slower day to go through some back e-mails, I came across this fairly comprehensive summary detailing the results of a survey on corporate legal affairs. Surprisingly, it indicates that lawsuits in 2006-2007 were down from the previous year. The survey was conducted by a law firm, which corresponded with some 250 coroporations.

The summary doesn't speculate that improved RM is one of the reasons for the reduced rate of corporate lawsuits, but findings like, "...81% of U.S. companies said they had reviewed their retention policies over the previous 12 months," indicate to me that better RM might have something to do with it. Another interesitng tidbit I is the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are not having much effect on litigation practices to date. This is something we predicted a couple years ago, as the rules as we read them, didn't seem to have too much teeth.

As I said, the survey summary is fairly lengthy, but it's at least worth giving a cursory read-through. It touches on relevent topics like e-discovery, RM, records retention, and all that good stuff.

Cheers.

Ralph

Visioneer-BBH Scanners Announce Partnership

Visioneer and Bowe Bell + Howell Scanners have announced a development agreement, which will lead to products early next year. The companies aren't commenting specifically on products yet, but with BBH specializing in the higher end of the market and Visioneer in the distributed side, it definitely makes for some intirguing possibilities. BBH also seems very interested in leveraging Visioneer's OneTouch scanning interface and toolkit for application integration, as well as its Xerox OEM channel. If you take these two companies product lines and channels and combine them together, you have something that can go toe-to-toe against heavyweights FCPA and Kodak. They are also both very close partners with Kofax.

Bish named Dicom CEO

In a somewhat stunning development, the Dicom Group named Reynolds Bish as CEO this morning. DIR had first suggested this move when Dicom announced it was looking for a CEO late July. Dicom after all has been struggling to get its market capitalization above its annual revenue of $400 million - this despite being fairly conistently profitable and having over $100 million in the bank. Bish built his reputation on raising Captiva's market cap from less than $20 million in 2002 to more than $200 million by the time the company was sold to EMC for $275 million in late 2005.

Part of the problem with Dicom's current valuation on the London Stock Exchange where it primarily trades, may be that the company is still perceived as a distributor of hardware products, a business model that clearly isn't valued very highly by U.K. investors. U.K.-based distribution competitor Headway was recently sold for something like half its annual revenue. As Bish has a background in software, unlike his predecessor as Dicom CEO, Rob Klatell, whose background was closer to distribution, he is a much better choice to distance Dicom from its roots as a hardware distributor.

Dicom broke into the software business in 1999 when it acquired Kofax for $70 million. At the time, Dicom was a $123 million company and Kofax was generating $33 million in annual revenue. Now, software generates approximately 60% of Dicom's revenue, with Kofax's document capture business leading the way. Bish's hiring, and the fact that he will be based in Irvine, the site of Kofax's headquarters, firmly cements Kofax's position, as the crown jewel in the Dicom business portfolio. This is a position its held financially for years. It's good to see Kofax being handed over the adminstrative reins as well.

Check out our exclusive interview with Bish in next week's issue of DIR.

RG