Lexmark Acquires BPM ISV

Lexmark has paid $50.2 million to acquire Dutch BPM ISV Pallas Athena. According to the press release, "Upon completion of the transaction, the Dutch company will become a part of Perceptive Software, a stand-alone business unit within Lexmark." Perceptive is the document imaging-focused ISV that Lexmark acquired a year-and-a-half ago for $280 million.

So far, Lexmark's strategy for Perceptive has included leveraging its worldwide footprint to aggressively expand Perceptive's international footprint. A similar strategy could be utilized for Pallas Athena, which is headquartered in Apeldoorn, Netherlands and has regional offices in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Belgium and the Caribbean . I am not really familiar with the company.

According to the press release, "Pallas Athena is a leading provider of BPM, DOM (document output management) and process mining software, with significant industry experience in the insurance, government and life sciences segments. Pallas Athena's software products enable a broad range of BPM capabilities, which includes dynamic case management and customer communications management."

So, the dynamic case management stuff would seem to be right up Perceptive's alley, but the DOM and customer communications - well, that's getting into output. Historically, Perceptive has not necessarily been a player in the output world, but it's certainly not unprecedented to attempt to make the crossover. EMC Documentum, for example, did with its Document Sciences acquisition. And being part of Lexmark, well, print output is, of course, just as important as scanning (and probably moreso) on MFPs.

Lexmark says it will have no further comment until it announces its financial results for the third quarter. "Lexmark plans to announce third quarter 2011 earnings on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2011. A conference call is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. EDT on that day, and can be accessed from Lexmark's investor relations website at http://investor.lexmark.com."