Kofax Places its Bets on SPAs

As many of us know earlier this month, Kofax pre-announced that its fiscal 2015 'Q1 results would be below expectations. The final results came out yesterday, and, pretty much as expected Kofax's revenue came in at $69.3M (growth of just 2.3%), sales generated from software licenses fell by 3.5%, and earnings decreased almost 50% to $4.3M or just a 6.3% margin.

In a call discussing the pre-announcement, Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish blamed the shortfall on some larger capture deals that did not close as expected. This was the second quarter in a row for which he used to same excuse. Investors were none too happy, and Kofax's stock plummeted - losing almost 25% of its value overnight. The stock has since gained back some of its value, but as of right now, Kofax's market capitalization is around $550M, which is less than two times revenue and about 30% below Kofax's high-water valuation mark reached this summer.

On the follow-up call to the recent final earnings announcement, Bish stated that Kofax had closed one of the two seven-figure deals that had slipped at the end of Q1, as well as several six-figure deals. He also reiterated that mid-market capture sales through the channel remained strong-but that increased scrutiny at the higher end of the capture market, especially in Europe, through both direct and indirect sales channels, was making sales tougher.

While Bish did not come right and say that the capture market, which still accounts for the majority of Kofax sales, was weak, he did restate that new sales reps are primarily being hired to focus on sales of newer/acquired product lines (including mobile), which in Q1 accounted for 35% of Kofax's software license revenue. "Most of the new quota bearing sales reps we've added over the 18 months have been in the mobile and newer acquired products part of our business," Bish said (from the Seeking Alpha transcript of the analyst call).

In the Q&A portion of the call, Bish added some color to comments he had made previously about reallocating resources and expenditures to focus more on the faster growing parts of Kofax's business specifically "mobile and new or acquired products." "There are a number of additional steps that we've taken here more recently to do so and most of them are aligned along the demand generation efforts," he said.

Bish added that because of Kofax's longevity and reputation the capture market, cutting back on demand-generation efforts in that market "hasn't historically tended the impact that business or ability to generate business there."

Bish then added that Kofax's current salespeople, many of whom also have a strong legacy in capture, have been given stogner incentives to sell the newer products. "There are a lot of reps out there, that have been with the company for many years, who certainly find things like Kofax Capture and Kofax Transformation modules to be their comfort zone, and so we've implemented a number of incentives as well as management processes in order to move them faster from the old legacy products to Kofax TotalAgility."

TotalAgility is the platform that Kofax introduced last year, which combines multiple of its acquired technologies in areas like BPM, business intelligence/analytics, application integration, and presumably e-signatures, and combines them with capture and IDR in a single Web-based and mobile platform. Said Bish, "[TA] can program capture functions, but more importantly can also automate the downstream synergistic business processes, provide a much higher value, a much more comprehensive solution and can also ultimately lead into providing true Smart Process Applications."

Attacking this potentially lucrative SPA space, which is squarely addressed with Kofax's First Mile marketing program, seems to where this market-leading capture ISV wants to train its focus, although it's likely that its market presence, technology set, experience, and momentum, will enable Kofax to maintain its leadership position in the enterprise capture space as well.

Focused on the Future
I think it's worth noting that when Kofax says that 35% of its new license revenue is coming from sales of "mobile and new or acquired software products" that does not necessarily mean these are true SPA sales. They may be of technologies that can be leveraged in SPAs, but capture fits under that bill as well. The majority of these sales, from what I understand, are more or less point solution sales - that said, some are into new and exciting markets, like in the case Kapow's data integration technology.

Yes, Kofax seems to be treating capture like a cash cow, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. As we've said several times over the past year, the capture market is maturing, especially at the enterprise level where Kofax often competes. This may have something to do with the delays in larger sales. There is nothing wrong with a market leader taking its profits from a mature technology and investing them in a potentially higher growth emerging market. Let's just hope that the SPA market proves to be the correct bet for Kofax.