A Look at Lexmark's Q3 Results

Lexmark reported its Q3 2016 results this morning. The focus in the news was that overall the company increased profits by 40% YOY, to $49M from $35M last year. Our main focus in DIR is the Lexmark Enterprise Software (ES) division, which over the past few years rolled up several companies covered by us, including, Kofax, Perceptive, Brainware, and ReadSoft.

The Kofax acquisition, which practically doubled the size of Lexmark ES, was completed in Q2 2015, so Q3 2015 represented Lexmark ES' first full quarter including Kofax results. Lexmark ES Q3 2015 revenue was reported at $165M with operating margins increasing to 19% - a positive trend. Of course, these results were released just three days after Lexmark had announced that is was "exploring strategic alternatives to enhance shareholder value." So, a lot has happened between then and now, including, in April, Lexmark agreeing to be acquired by a consortium of Chinese investors led by Apex Technology and PAG Asia Capital.

As Apex's primary business is the manufacture of ink cartridge chips, there have been questions about its use for Lexmark ES, and rumors have been flying that Lexmark ES would be sold in its entirety or piecemeal prior to the Apex acquisition closing, which is supposed to happen before the end of this year. In the meantime, Lexmark ES struggled through a rough first quarter before rebounding somewhat in Q2.  For Q3 Lexmark has reported revenue of $157M or about a 5% YOY decrease. Not great numbers, but considering all the FUD in the market surrounding who is going to own Lexmark ES going forward, not terrible. We didn't get any other numbers, like profitability related to Lexmark ES, as Lexmark corporate is keeping reporting to a minimum, and "will not conduct quarterly conference calls while the [acquisition] is pending."

To us the Q3 numbers indicated that Lexmark ES is still a very viable business, albeit with a run rate closer to $600M than the $700M that was originally projected when Kofax was acquired. ES has a large install base, along with plenty of maintenance revenue, as well as a stack of technology that it continues to invest in. So, what's it worth? Probably not the $1.89B we were speculating on in the wake of Open Text's acquisition of EMC's Enterprise Content Division (ECD). That was based on the projected $700M run rate.

Let's scale back that run rate to a more realistic $640M. Applying the same multiple of 2.7x revenue that Open Text paid for ECD, that puts a price for Lexmark ES closer to $1.73B, which still wouldn't be a bad price, considering Apex and PAG are paying $3.6B for the entirety of Lexmark, which is about equal to the revenue that the entirety of Lexmark reported for 2015. So, if they were to get even $1.5B for Lexmark ES, they would still be getting an approximately $3B hardware entity for close to $2B, which seems like a great deal. That said, Apex and PAG may be willing to go even lower on Lexmark ES, depending on what they value that hardware business at.

The bottom line is that Lexmark ES, even with its recent growth struggles, could be had at a relative bargain it seems. The question is, of course, who would buy it? Open Text is presumably out of the picture after the ECD acquisition, but you never know. Hyland owner Thoma Bravo has been rumored to be in play, but at their recent conference Hyland executives gave us no indication that was under consideration. Xerox wanted to buy Kofax before Lexmark did, and Xerox has stated they are on the ECM acquisition trail, but if the $1B price that Lexmark paid topped their original bid, would they be inclined to pay more for something larger, or would Apex and PAG be willing to break off Kofax separately for Xerox and sell it to them at their original bid? Or could Lexmark ES execs like Reynolds Bish and Carl Mergele cobble together enough financial backing for a private equity bid?

We still expect something to happen with Lexmark ES before the Apex/PAG acquisition closes. That would give us a little over two months. Stay tuned!

Today's Financial Services Market Demands Innovative, Stable Capture Solutions

Dell EMC’s Enterprise Content Division (ECD) has been a long-time leader in the document capture software market. It is probably best known for high-volume, back-office implementations, but like everyone else trying to stay competitive in the market, ECD has done a lot to address more modern capture initiatives. This includes the introduction of Web services, cloud, and mobile technology.

Following is a piece I developed with input from ECD, discussing how its software addresses the evolving requirements of today’s financial services organizations:

I recently had the opportunity to attend to a presentation by Chris Surdak, the author of a book titled “Jerk” with the subtitle, “Twelve Steps to Rule the World.” It’s about how to thrive in the emerging era of digital transformation. One of his main premises is that “information is the new wealth,” which he attempted to demonstrate through a slide showing that the three most highly valued public companies in the world today—Apple, Google, and Microsoft—are in the information management business.

Financial services companies, of course, are involved in managing traditional wealth, but that doesn’t mean information management is not important to them. The current movement of big banks toward partnering with Fintech start-ups or launching their own Fintech spin-offs, is an example of this.

Document capture is another area where financial services organizations must stay current if they want to keep pace. Banks and other organizations specializing in wealth management have been long-time users of document capture technologies. But, as the technology continues to evolve, and innovations like agile deployment and mobile capture are introduced, many financial services providers have not fully embraced these advancements. Rather, they continue to operate their capture operations like monolithic, hard-coded silos.

In his presentation, Surdak noted that three pillars for success in this era of information management include immediacy, quality, and intimacy. A modern document capture platform can help a financial services organization build all three. It can help them more quickly turn around customer submissions with more accurate and targeted responses, which will in turn increase their levels of intimacy.

Let’s take a look at some of the characteristics financial services organizations should be looking for in their capture platform:

Openness
It was an ancient Greek philosopher who first came up with the idea that “the only constant is change.” In today’s world of constant information flow, change comes even faster. And customers don’t care if back-end systems can keep up with this change, they just want results. (This attitude was defined by Surdak as “disengagement,” which is another user characteristic in the information economy.)

If a financial services organization needs to make a change, such as adding a capability or workflow to their capture process, they better be able to do it fast. Unfortunately, according to a 2015 World Retail Banking Report by Capgemini, less than 15% of banking executives rate their back-office digital capabilities as “advanced.”

One characteristic of an advanced back-office system would be openness. In other words, how easy is it to integrate a new capability like an OCR engine to handle a different language or to integrate to a different repository to quickly onboard an ECM system that might have been part of an acquisition?

One example of an open capture platform is ECD's Captiva. From its early days, the software has been designed to accommodate third-party services, and over the years the APIs have matured and become even more accessible. Captiva offers its own set of services that can be inserted where needed and its platform can also leverage third-party software to add capabilities like handwriting recognition, foreign language OCR, specialized PDF processing, advanced forms recognition, and more.

Cloud
To complement its on-premises Captiva application, earlier this year Dell EMC’s Enterprise Content Division (ECD) announced Snap as part of its new LEAP cloud ECM platform [a brief video presentation on Snap]. Optimized for lower volume distributed capture applications, like account opening at a branch office, Snap doesn’t offer Captiva’s complete breadth of capabilities. But it’s designed to be very easy to deploy—with a target time of five minutes to configure a new document type. To assist with set-up, ECD is offering an option of outsourced document capture design available through the Snap interface.

The simple and fast set-up of Snap has two big advantages in today’s information age. If everything works well, an organization will have improved both accuracy and the turnaround time compared to manual capture operations. If it does not work out, which we all know is the case all too often with capture, the user finds out quickly and can try again. The concept of reducing time to failure is gaining traction in this age where there is so much pressure to reduce turnaround times in all areas.

The bottom line is that Snap offers a relatively inexpensive and quick way to launch multiple document capture workflows. This enables a financial services organization to keep up with business models that also need to be able to change rapidly based on intelligence being gained from an ever-increasing influx of information.

Mobile
As the volume of transactions completed over mobile devices continues to gain momentum, mobile document capture can’t be far behind. After all, the primary reason people implement document capture is typically related to some sort of business transaction. For a financial services organization this might be new account opening, a money transfer, or applying for a loan. Well, guess what? As more users embrace mobile banking (According to the Federal Reserve’s 2016 Consumers and Mobile Financial Services Report, 43% of adults that have both mobile phones and bank accounts reported using mobile banking—up from 39% a year earlier ), more financial services transactions are also going to move to mobile.

Users have already proven they are comfortable depositing checks into their accounts utilizing their smartphones. According to the 2016 Mobile Deposit Benchmark Report, about 41% of banking customers have used a mobile deposit service. Because of their small size and relatively simple and consistent layout, checks were a natural place to start with mobile capture. Technology has now advanced to the point where automating capture of data from larger and more complex documents is also possible.

What if a customer is applying for a loan through their smartphone, for example, and the bank requires copies of W-2s and recent pay check stubs? Or what if an insurance company is asking for proof-of-loss documentation to settle a property damage claim? There is technology, like Captiva Mobile Capture, that can enable users to easily and successfully capture high quality images of these types of documents. Captiva Mobile Capture can be integrated with Captiva’s RESTful services or with an automated data extraction application on a server to complete the transaction processing. This type of integrated system can be configured to provide an end user with immediate feedback on if their document was received, if it included the appropriate information, and whether or not their submission can be moved along to the next step. This is the type of turnaround that people are seeking in today’s world.

ECD Capture – innovative yet mature
A lot of what we are talking about is cutting edge and modern technology. As a long-time capture market leader, ECD might not be the first vendor you think of as developing next-generation technology. ECD’s duplicity, however, is one of the advantages to working with them. They not only can address and understand high-volume traditional back-office capture applications, they can also help organizations move forward with their cloud and mobile initiatives. As so often happens during a period of transition, there will also be instances where legacy applications and modern initiatives will need to be weaved together. As one of the few vendors with interests on both sides, ECD can be counted on not only to provide expertise across the board, but also to be impartial with respect to the type of technology being deployed.

So, if you are a financial services organization looking to move your capture technology to the next generation, don’t look at ECD as purely a legacy vendor. Yes, their history in the market guarantees they are that, but their introduction of a modern architecture, as well as cloud and mobile capabilities, demonstrates that proven technology vendors can also drive innovation.

Putting a Price Tag on Information

Guest Column

Intro: It seems that recently we are running into more and more technology industry visionaries who are saying we now have entered the “Age of Information.” At the recent Harvey Spencer Associates Capture Conference, for instance, author Chris Surdak showed a slide "Information is the New Wealth" that listed the top six companies in the world by market capitalization. Apple, Google, and Microsoft, which he said basically specialize in "information management" topped the slide, followed by more traditional companies like Exxon Mobile, Berkshire Hathaway and PetroChina. The problem is, as AIIM Chief Evangelist John Mancini points out in his excellent piece, there is no standard in place for measuring information as a tangible asset. 

Check it out: 

By John Mancini, chief evangelist, AIIM

No company in the digital age could run without it and it is arguably the most important asset any organization has—but how do you put a price on information?

Intellectual property is listed as an intangible asset in financial reports. But there is no line on the balance sheet for information. No standard method or process for giving it a value, despite the fact that we are churning out more and more information every day. To put this into perspective it is estimated that Facebook users share around 2.5 million bits of content a minute. IBM estimates we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.

Information is coming at us from everywhere—from social media, purchase transactions, blogs, GPS data, sensors etc. This list is endless. The consumerization of IT, cloud, mobile, and the Internet of Things, have all contributed to a surge in big data that is literally changing our world and the way we operate in it.

Information is now one of a company’s most precious assets. When used correctly it can provide companies with a wealth of insight about their customers and competitors that can give them a business edge. Companies are investing heavily in protecting, securing, analyzing and documenting this data. 

Business leaders increasingly talk about how information is their most valuable asset. Yet information still does not appear on the balance sheet. As Doug Laney, vice president at Gartner so concisely puts it: “We are in the midst of the information age, yet information is still considered a non-entity by antiquated standards”. 

In this age of digital transformation, it comes as a surprise that there is no standard model for valuing information.

Accounting for information

As far as I can see, there is a growing gap between the traditional ways we value organizations, in terms of the tangible and intangible assets reported in financial statements, and the value the market puts on organisations. The huge sums paid for some companies shows our inability to measure and value the information assets of an organization.

According to Laney, in 1975 on average the tangible assets of a corporation represented 83% of its value. Today that number is 20%. Therefore, more than 50% of merger and acquisition exchange simply can’t be accounted for.

Take for example Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn. Look at the accounting value of LinkedIn—$3.2 billion in revenues—and compare it to the price paid by Microsoft—$26 billion—and it doesn’t appear to make sense. We immediately start asking the obvious questions: Are we on the verge of another doc.com bubble?  Why is the accounting value of the company so different from its market value? Has Microsoft lost the plot?

The answer, I believe, is quite straightforward. The disharmony comes from our inability to measure and value information assets in an organization. This is reflected in the growing division between what we actually report about companies and what we actually inherently know about them. But it is also linked to the way we continually undervalue the investments companies have made in creating, analyzing, protecting and storing their data to create real customer value.

Finding a measure

The nearest thing we have to measuring information right now is ‘Infonomics’. This is essentially a framework for organizations to measure, manage, and monetize information as a real asset. But it has still to be taken on board fully by organizations.

Early this year, in a bid to come up an answer to assigning a value to information, AIIM brought together industry leaders in information management from the likes of Shell and Gartner, to discuss this pressing issue.

One particular point soon became crystal clear—we need a standardized way to measure the value of information, and we need it fast.  Although most organizations now understand how valuable their information is, they have no way of valuing it as an asset. This is an important job for information professionals and accountants to get to grips with over the coming months and years, and one that AIIM will be devoting considerable energy to. 

As business becomes more and more information driven, it is imperative that there is a standard in place that can measure the usefulness and monetary value of information. How this is to be done has still to be decided. But it is a problem that isn’t going to go away.

For more information: www.aiim.org

Based on ECD Deal, what is Lexmark ES Worth?

Big day today for M&A in the enterprise content management (ECM) space. No less than three significant announcements:

1. Open Text announces plans to buy EMC's Enterprise Content Division (ECD) for $1.62B or 2.7x ECD's fiscal '15 revenue of $599M.
2. Apparently Bloomberg News is reporting that Apex Technology Co. and PAG Asia Capital, which in April announced plans to acquire Lexmark, "are in talks with a number of private equity firms about a sale of [Lexmark Enterprise Software (ES)]."
3. Finally, HP announced plans to buy Samsung's printer business for $1.05B. 

Not that this last item is insignificant, but, despite some recent efforts, Samsung had yet to emerge as a real factor in the ECM/document capture space. So, in this post, we'll focus on the significance of those first two announcements. 

ECD had been rumored to be for sale since it was first announced that Dell was planning to acquire EMC. There were two reasons that were offered for the rumored sale: 1. Dell wanted to focus on storage and ECD did not fit with that strategy. 2. Dell reportedly needed to generate some cash to help with the financing of the deal. Well, there must have been some truth behind this talk, as less than a week after the Dell/EMC deal closed, the deal with Open Text for ECD was announced. The ECD sale to Open Text is expected to close within the next 3-4 months.

Open Text has done a lot of acquisitions over the years, and I'd have to say that the $1.62B price tag and 2.7x revenue multiple represents a pretty good premium for them to pay. So, Open Text obviously thinks they are getting something of value. ECD is, of course, a good fit, as Open Text and ECD are both serious ECM players with some overlapping, but also a lot of complementary, technology. The move pushes Open Text forward even further as a market leader. 

It also likely removes Open Text from the bidding for Lexmark ES, which Open Text had been rumored to be looking at fairly recently. So, with rumors obviously still floating around that Lexmark ES is for sale, who is out there to buy them? The other name I have been hearing is Thoma Bravo, which owns Hyland. Coincidentally, I am going to be at Hyland's CommunityLive Conference this week. 

One of the big story lines associated with the conference is that this is going to be former CTO Miguel Zubizarreta's final event with the company where he has worked practically since it was founded. Zubizarreta has always had a reputation of wanting to build rather than buy technology, so the fact the Lexmark ES is now on the market as he is retiring could be a fortuitous coincidence - if indeed it's a coincidence at all. I hope to get some insight into Hyland's direction over the next few days.

So, how much would Thoma Bravo have to pay to pick up Lexmark ES, or even just the Kofax piece, which is rumored to be on the market separately as well? Well, first off, let me say that the Bloomberg article's statement that Lexmark ES "could fetch as much as $1 billion" seems to be way off. Remember, from 2010 to 2015, Lexmark invested approximately $2B in rolling up the components that make up ES, so to think they would turn around and sell it for less than what they paid just for Kofax last year ($1B), seems preposterous. (Of course, EMC paid $1.7B for Documentum alone in 2003, not to mention $275M for Captiva two years later, plus more for some other stuff included in ECD, but those acquisitions and valuations were a long time ago compared to the Lexmark ES acquisitions.) 

Okay, so what can Lexmark's investors expect to get for ES? Well, in my opinion, Lexmark ES lines up pretty closely with ECD. They both own market leading capture software (Kofax and Captiva, respectively) as well as large ECM practices - Perceptive and Documentum. Granted, Documentum is a higher end business than Perceptive traditionally has been, but Perceptive has traditionally been one of Hyland's most direct competitors, just as Documentum has been one of Open Text's. 

So, let's just say Lexmark's investors want to get a premium similar to what Open Text paid for ECD. To start, we'll value Lexmark ES as a $700M a year business, as that's about the run rate that was being projected when Lexmark bought Kofax last spring. Using that 2.7x revenue multiple that Open Text paid, that would value Lexmark ES at $1.89B, which is not a bad number, because it enables Lexmark to save some face on their $2B investment. (Kofax made up about half the ES run rate, so based on the ECD revenue metric, a Kofax sale would be about $950M). I guess it just depends if Thomas Bravo or whoever is going to make the purchase agrees that Lexmark ES is worth what ECD was worth. If they do, I bet a deal gets turned pretty quickly.

Lexmark ES Rebounds in Q2

Lexmark's Q2 results for its Enterprise Software (ES) division do not appear to be terrible. On Friday, the Lexington, KY-based MFP vendor announced its Q2 2016 results, and while overall earnings were disappointing, ES seemed to have rebounded from a very disappointing Q1. For Q2, Lexmark reported ES revenue of $167M, which represented an 11% YOY increase. But, before you get too excited, Q2 2015 only contained about a month and a half worth of Kofax revenue, as Lexmark's acquisition of the capture market software leader closed in mid-May last year. In the first complete quarter of Kofax revenue (Q3 2015), Lexmark reported ES revenue of $165M.

Of course, immediately upon announcing its Q3 numbers last year, Lexmark announced it was looking at selling either the whole or parts of its company, which sent the ES business into a bit of a tailspin. Things bottomed out in Q1 of this year when Lexmark reported ES revenue of just $143M, a 14% decline from the combined revenue of Lexmark's Perceptive Software and Kofax (which were combined to create Lexmark ES) in Q1 2015.

So, it's good to see that now Lexmark's ES business appears back on track in spite of April's announcement that the entirety of Lexmark was being acquired by a group of China-based investors led by Apex Technology Co., Ltd. and PAG Asia Capital. A week previous to the Q2 earnings announcement, it was announced that Lexmark shareholders had approved the "merger agreement." There was a lot of speculation that being owned by a Chinese entity could adversely affect enterprise software sales due to concerns about security related to a lack of regulation in China. In my research and conversations, I could find nothing to substantiate these concerns and apparently they didn't negatively affect sales in Q2.

I'm not exactly sure what led to the turnaround from Q1, except that perhaps once the deal for the acquisition was in place, the ES team was better able to focus on its business. ES President Reynolds Bish had told me in a conversation at Lexmark ES's Inspire event in early April, that the distractions related to a potential acquisition had taken a toll on his organization.

Of course, rumors continue to swirl that Lexmark ES will still be spun off and a decent quarter like Q2 should help increase its potential value. Although it's still hard to see Lexmark recouping the approximately $2B in spent rolling up ES in the six-year period from 2010 through 2015.

Management Changes Continue at Kodak Alaris

A week after announcing a restructuring of the sales management team at Kodak Alaris Information Management (IM), Kodak Alaris announced it is looking for a new CEO. In an announcement we received today, Kodak Alaris states, "To better position ourselves to achieve our long term growth plans, the Kodak Alaris Holdings Ltd. Board of Directors decided the time is right to initiate a search for a new CEO."

Effective May 1, Ralf Gerbershagen, who was named CEO of Kodak Alaris in 2014, has stepped down. According to statement DIR received from Kodak Alaris: "Today’s announcement is about looking forward. This was not a performance based decision but more an assessment of the future leadership needs of Kodak Alaris. The Board felt this represented the ideal time to begin the new search for a CEO. [Gerbershagen] leaves the company better positioned than when he arrived and with our best wishes for his future."

 Kodak Alaris was launched in September 2013, with the sale of Kodak Document Imaging (now IM) and Kodak Personal Imaging to the Kodak UK Pension Fund for a combination of $2.8 billion in debt relief and $650 million in cash and non-cash considerations. The sale was part of the bankruptcy proceedings for Eastman Kodak.

Gerbershagen, who is based in the UK was brought in from Motorola Mobility in April, 2014. During his tenure, Kodak Alaris reportedly saw a strong rebound in its scanner sales, which were negatively affected by the uncertainty related to the bankruptcy proceedings. Kodak Alaris was less successful with a intelligent document recognition (IDR) venture. After signing a partnership with German ISV ITyX in 2012 and struggling to generate any sales momentum, in 2015 Kodak Alaris launched a subsidiary, AI Foundry, which is totally focused on IDR sales. However, shortly after the launch of AI Foundry, Kodak Alaris broke off its relationship with ITyX, which then filed suit.

According to Alan Swahn, VP, marketing for AI Foundry, in an e-mail to DIR last month, “We are working with other suppliers that more closely align with new opportunities in the marketplace. We are working on exciting new solutions and you can expect announcements later this year.”

Jeff Goodman has been appointed as Kodak Alaris' CEO on an interim basis. Goodman had been serving as COO. Kodak Alaris has not set a timetable for hiring a new CEO. Following is a statement form Kodak Alaris: "We are looking for an outstanding and inspirational leader with a proven global track record of identifying and driving long term profitable growth for large international companies.

"As we need to conduct a comprehensive search for our next CEO, we don’t have a specific timetable. Jeff’s presence, combined with the company being in a solid place, allows our board to conduct a thorough search for our next CEO. Jeff is committed to filling this role until we find our new CEO and will support his/her transition to the role."

We asked a Kodak Alaris representative if the organization's goals have changed since Gerbershagen was brought in two years ago. Here was the reply: "We continue to transform the company and our current focus has shifted from restructuring to growth. Our plans and our ongoing programs, developed by the Kodak Alaris Executive Committee (of which Jeff was and is a part) and approved by our Board, remain unchanged and have our absolute focus and commitment."

Lexmark ES Q1 Numbers Disturbing

For those of you that haven't done the math for yourselves, Lexmark Enterprise Software (ES) saw about a 15% decline in revenue for Q1, YOY. Yes, we realize Lexmark reported 60% growth for ES on revenue of $143 million, but last year's Q1 didn't include Kofax's numbers. In calendar Q1 last year (Kofax's fiscal Q3), the ISV did $75 million in revenue, and it also acquired a $9 million a year business in Aia Software towards the end of the quarter. So, we'll put Kofax's Q1 2015 revenue at around $77 million.

In the meantime, Perceptive Software, operating as a division of Lexmark, reported $90 million for the first quarter of 2015. If you put those two figures together, it gives you a Q1 2015 revenue number of $167 million, $24 million more than the two combined businesses reported this year for Q1 as parts of Lexmark ES. We don't have any insight into the breakdown of the Lexmark ES in numbers - in particular, how much was from generated in software sales, but we had heard rumors that Lexmark was struggling in that area in particular.

The 15% erosion in revenue is disturbing, and we hope it is not indicative of the industry's direction. We realize Lexmark has been struggling with integration issues, as well as uncertainty related to the recent sale of the company, so maybe the first quarter was an anomaly and the organization will bounce back strongly. That said, Lexmark's competitors are certainly trying to keep the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) levels pumped up, as I heard a lot of talk at the recent AIIM Conference related to the potential challenges of being owned by a group of investors from China.

In addition to Lexmark, Open Text failed to show organic growth in Q1 (its fiscal Q3), EMC's Enterprise Content Division (ECD) revenue continued to shrink, down to $134 million in Q1 2016 from $138 million in Q1 2015 (not to mention the fact that EMC is reportedly trying to sell ECD to help fund the Dell acquisition), and Top Image Systems (TIS) struggled in Q4 '15 with its Q1 2016 numbers still to come. It has not been all bleak news, as smaller companies like DocuWare and M-Files reported strong growth for 2015, and Hyland Software had another strong year as well.

What is somewhat interesting is that DocuWare, M-Files, and to some extent Hyland, are focused on the SMB space (Hyland stressing the "M"), while EMC, Kofax, and to some extent ReadSoft (also part of Lexmark ES) and Open Text are more focused on the enterprise space. So, maybe the growth in the ECM market is in the traditionally underserved SMB space (as we've been predicting would happen for years). This would certainly bode well for TIS, which recently put a stronger focus on shopping financial process automation to the mid-market.  Then again, the Perceptive Software's content management business is a major part of Lexmark ES and it focuses on the mid-market (we're really not sure how the individual components within the division made out).

When you add these recent ECM software struggles to the steady erosion we've seen in margins in the document scanner hardware market (as well as some of the reogranization at the leaders ), it makes us doubt the future of our industry. That said, the attitude at this week's AIIM Conference in New Orleans was not wholly pessimistic. There were plenty of optimistic vendors, a bevy of end users looking for solutions, and the usual group of energetic and imaginative people that combine to make our industry so exciting at times. New solutions stressing, the cloud, mobile, and emerging technology like natural language processing - as well as a new vision embracing enterprise content as data and thus creating a bridge for mainstream IT crossover, certainly created plenty of positive buzz at the AIIM event (or was that just the alcohol on Bourbon Street?). We'll have more details on what we learned at AIIM in the next issue of DIR.

In the meantime, let's hope for a stronger Q2 for everyone (well, except for your competitors in some cases, I guess.)

Management Changes at Kodak Alaris IM

Word came out yesterday that Kodak Alaris Information Management has changed its management structure. Cássio Vaquero, who had been serving as regional director of emerging markets (Asia-Pacific and Latin America) has apparently been appointed to a new head of global sales position. In conjunction with that, Martin Birch, Kodak Alaris' IM's regional manager for the US&C, and Erwin Schwarzl, regional manager for EAMER, have been let go. 

Here's a quote from Kodak Alaris on the shake up: "With the global integration of key business functions, including sales, within IM, we are transitioning to a new worldwide operational model. We thank Martin and Erwin for their contributions and wish them well in the future as we continue to help our customers grow their business using Kodak Alaris scanners, software and services."

The move is a bit surprising as Birch and Schwarzl have only been in their current positions for about a year. Last April, Birch, who was serving as regional director for EAMER, moved to the U.S. to take over for Russell Hunt, who retired. Schwarzl had been serving in another capacity at Kodak Alaris. Both Birch and Schwarzl worked at Kodak (and then Kodak Alaris) for several years.

These moves are part of a tumultuous few months at Kodak Alaris IM, which has also included some changes within its AI Foundry intelligent document recognition (IDR) software business.  

Lasefiche EMPOWER Event Continues to Grow

LONG BEACH, CA – It was good to return to the Laserfiche EMPOWER Conference this year after a three-year hiatus. Last time I had the opportunity to attend was 2012. I had planned to go in 2013, but a snowstorm changed that. 

Since that 2012 event, I haven't really had a chance to connect with the Laserfiche executive team. And there have been big changes to that team over that time. In 2013, Tom Wayman, VP of marketing and product strategy, died. The next year, his mother and company founder and CEO Nien-Ling Wacker passed away. (Both had awards named after them that were presented at this year's conference.) Nien-Ling's husband Chris Wacker has taken over as CEO, with CTO Karl Chan having added president to his title. In 2014, Laserfiche named Thomas Phelps IV as its VP of corporate strategy and marketing.

During the last few years, Laserfiche has continued to grow. For the 2012 conference, which was held at the Anaheim Marriott, I reported 1,600 people attended. For this year's event, which was moved to the Long Beach Convention Center (a much bigger venue), Laserfiche announced 2,700 attendees. Chris Wacker also told me the company enjoyed 10-12%  revenue growth in 2015 over 2014, which was also a growth year.

Overall, 880 organizations were represented at EMPOWER. This included a mix of end users, resellers, and vendor partners. The big announcement was the release of Laserfiche 10, which features improvements in collaborative and mobile capabilities, as well as the introduction of a library of more than 100 pre-built workflows across several vertical markets and horizontal applications. New analytics tools for BPM were also introduced.

A few things that have not changed in the four years since I last attended EMPOWER:

1. Laserfiche remains very strong in state and local government market.
2. There is still a big push toward getting many of these government customers to expand their implementations enterprise wide. It seems to be working. For example, I attended a presentation by the City of Boca Raton, which has expanded its implementation from the clerk's office to the A/P department and now has 50 more projects either currently being implemented or that have been requested. Many of the attendees I spoke with were considering similar (if not quite as big) expansions.
3. Epson is still the event's premier sponsor, although Epson's scanner business has grown considerably since 2012. According to Mark Pickard, senior product manager, Document Scanners, Epson America (citing numbers from the NPD group) through the first 11 months of 2015, the company's revenue from commercial scanners grew 24% over 2014, which was twice as fast as Epson's nearest competitor. He credited Epson's relationship with Laserfiche and its channel as contributing to that growth.

We'll have more detailed coverage of the event in our next newsletter, but that's a quick summary for you.