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."

EMC White Paper on ECM in Post PC Era

If you read DIR or have seen me speak, you know that I'm intrigued by the growing adoption of mobile computing technology - beyond laptops, and trying to determine how it is going to affect the document imaging market going forward. It seems EMC has published a white paper that touches on this topic, entitled "Redefining Enterprise Content Management in the Post-PC Era." I haven't read the publication yet, but it promises to touch on

• The new model - what it is and how you can use it to your advantage
• The technologies that you'll need - including case processing and information governance
• The opportunities created by the new information landscape that will help you guarantee security, automate compliance, and streamline infrastructure
• The benefits of a redefined ECM system—such as better decision-making, more responsive customer service, and reduced operating and capital expenditures

 You can download a copy at https://emcinformation.com/29002/REG/.ashx?reg_src=SA. I think I will. 

 

 

Canon USA Solutions Subsidiary Announces Oracle SOA Workflow Platform

Canon Information and Imaging Solutions (CIIS) recently announced an SOA-based imaging and workflow platform desigend to connect ERP, CRM and ECM systems. CIIS is a services and solutions focused wholly owned subsidiary of Canon USA that was launched earlier this year. The new solution will be built on Oracle's SOA platform.

From the press release, "Designed by Canon IT Solutions Inc. of Japan, the new platform was developed as part of the global alliance between Canon and Oracle announced on September 26, 2011, leveraging Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle software products including Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle SOA Suite with Canon’s globally recognized imaging technologies."

Target date for release is second quarter of 2012.

PFU Invests in ABBYY

PFU Limited has reportedly invested about $100 million in ABBYY. PFU is a Fujitsu subsidiary which manufactures the scanners sold by Fujitsu subsidiaries worldwide, including FCPA. ABBYY is a developer of recognition technology including OCR/ICR and IDR used in document imaging applications.

This continues a trend of document imaging hardware vendors investing in software ISVs over the past few years. Of course, HP's acquisition of Autonomy, is the most recent example, with Lexmark acquiring Perceptive in 2010. PFU has also invested heavily in KnowledgeLake.

The investment reportedly values ABBYY's business at around $2 billion as it supposed to be for about a 5% stake. Not sure, what ABBYY's annual revenue is, but as Harvey Spencer values the worldwide document capture market at somewhere south of $2.5 billion, with ABBYY holding less than a 10% share of that...well PFU seems to have paid a pretty good premium for its investment, which is certainly in-line with what we've been seeing by hardware vendors looking to diversity into sofware.

Wireless Scanners on the Way

Xerox recently announced its first wireless MFP. This reminded me of a couple conversations I had recently regarding the potential of wirelss document scanners being introduced onto the market. My vision would be a wireless scanner or MFP that could scan an image to your smartphone or tablet, where you could preview it and then upload it to your ECM system.

DocVille Roundtable Event Set for Nov. 17

Michael Ziegler's Docville.net networking organization is planning its second conference on Nov. 17 in Brussels at Thon Hotel Bristol Stephanie. Ziegler has organized eight roundtable discussions for the event, which focuses on interactive conversation amongst those attending - rather than PowerPoint presentations. Attendees sign up for the sessions which are most interesting to them and there will a subject matter expert acting as a moderator at each session.

The roundtable topics have been "crowd sourced" by Docville, so they are relevent to prospective attendees. They are

•From Sourcing to Pay - an extended Business Value Chain


•Gaining a Foothold in Turkey & in countries of the Middle East

•BPM meets SMB: Trends & Challenges

•SharePoint in the eyes of ECM vendors & System Integrators– the decade long transformation from a friend to an enemy and back again

•Deployment of Next Generation Classification software

•Document Capture - The Most promising Vertical Markets in Europe

•Document Service & Scan Service BPOs- What is the best strategy for survival?

•Cloud Services – How can Channel Partners benefit, work together and charge for cloud computing services?

•Is SAP outsourcing its ECM capability

Click here for more details on the sessions.

Ziegler expects between 60-80 attendees. The event is targeted at those in the document imaging and management market that wish to do business in multiple European countries and overcome the challenges of working across borders.

Brainware and KnowledgeLake get together

Document imaging for SharePoint specialist KnowledgeLake has added Brainware as a partner. KnowledgeLake offers document capture and image management for SharePoint, but does not have any ADR - advanced document recognition technology, which Brainware offers. From Brainware's standpoint, the deal makes sense for Brainware as it attempts to increase its footprint in the Microsoft market. Earlier this year, Brainware announced it was making its ADR software available on Windows Azure.

Laserfice Resolves Trademark Suit vs. SAP

From the Laserfiche ACE (analystis, consultants and experts) blog:
"Laserfiche is pleased to announce that its litigation against SAP America, Inc., SAP AG and SAP Global Marketing over SAP’s use of the company’s Run Smarter® trademark has been resolved. The lawsuit was filed by Laserfiche in the United States District Court in Los Angeles on October 25, 2010 and was scheduled to go to trial this week.

"The terms of the settlement are confidential, but Compulink can disclose that the Parties settled the Action amicably and that the settlement involved a license of Compulink’s trademark for 'Run Smarter.'
Laserfiche’s complaint against SAP contended that SAP’s unauthorized, unlicensed use of “Run Smarter” infringed upon Laserfiche’s registered Run Smarter® trademark. Laserfiche owns United States Trademark and Service Mark Registration No. 3,085,357 for Run Smarter® and is also the owner of registrations for “Run Smarter” in other countries.

The federally registered Run Smarter® trademark has been the centerpiece of Laserfiche marketing campaigns since 2004. It is a strong trademark and service mark and a valuable asset of Laserfiche.

Here's an example of SAP using "Run Smarter."

Of course, they also seem to be using a "Run Better" campaign as well.

Here's Laserfiche announcing its "Run Smarter" awards.

Kofax Reaffirms Microsoft Focus

At the AIIM show in April, we caught up with a Kofax exec who told us the document capture ISV had some 200 implementations of users scanning into SharePoint repositories. This included British Waterways, which was touting savings of some $17 million credited to a SharePoint ECM implementation that included Kofax and some other third-party software products.

At Harvey Spencer's recent Capture Conference , we touted two reasons we believe it makes sense for indepentent capture vendors to get on board the Microsoft SharePoint train:

1. While other ECM players increase their capture technology, Microsoft will never get into capture
2.  SharePoint Continues to Grow in Importance as Windows desktop faces marginalization from mobile device

Kofax is exhibiting at the current Microsoft SharePoint Conference and issued this release today, touting itself as a leader in capturing to SharePoint environments. All signs point to Kofax contiuing to focus on image-enabling SharePoint environments and we look for more news on this front in the near future.

ABBYY Signs Reseller Agreement with Xerox

Xerox will now be selling ABBYY's Flexicapture document and data capture and Recognition Server OCR and PDF software, in connection with its DocuShare Web-based document management platform. Introduced as primarily an electronic document repository at least 10 years ago, Xerox has introduced records management and workflow features in recent years. With the ABBYY software Xerox is adding intelligent data capture and server-based OCR to the mix.

Xerox represents ABBYY's largest reseller partner. More on this in an upcoming premium issue of DIR.

Vertical Specialization Increasing

The sign of a maturing market is when you take proven technologies, such as document imaging and OCR and start to package them into soluitons. Invoice processing for accounts payable has been one of the big ones in our industry over the past few years. Recently we saw two announcements about imaging vendors moving more deeply into vertical solutions.

One is from Konica-Minotla, which has announced "customized electronic document management suites developed in conjunction with Prism Software to address workflow demands across key vertical markets." These include legal, education (both secondary and higher), healthcare, and legal.

The suites seem to be a combination e-forms/document mangement system. "The suite is powered by a robust document and forms management system that improves workflow efficiency by eliminating paper- based forms, while providing a low-cost document management solution for office environments of all sizes."

Recognition technology specialist Orbograph has acquired Correct Claims Now (CCN), a Dallas-based company, "that provides services in the field of Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management (RCM)." Basically the acquisition seems to enable Orbograph's recognition technology to the RCM processes that CCN specializes in. These include claims and EOB processing.

From the press release, "“Orbograph has extensive field experience and strong operational capabilities in deploying effective recognition-centric automation solutions for mission-critical financial environments. CCN provides deep expertise and know-how in healthcare payments processing”, said Barry Cohen, General Manager at Orbograph. “By joining forces, we can achieve an unprecedented level of revenue cycle efficiency that will provide critical advantages for providers including: lowering the cost of collecting and posting a payment, reducing aging of receivables, and increasing reimbursement amounts.”

Perceptive Discusses Content in Context

This week I came acorss this article on Fierce Content Management by Perceptive Software CTO Darren Knipp discussing how important it is for ECM vendors to embrace and control the context of conent. Knipp makes the point,  "Personas, processes, application integration and content types describe the context that we as ECM professionals need to design into our solutions in order for real value to be derived."

This reminded me of an article I wrote based on an interview with Perceptive VP of marketing Glenn Cross a couple months ago. Cross also discussed the importance of content in context and stressed that that is how Percpetive is going to differentiate itself from the big ECM ISVs like Microsoft, IBM, EMC, and Oracle going forward. "“Perceptive understands how people use content and the processes they use it in. Our software operates between content repositories and applications in areas like ERP, HR, and marketing. We serve up content, and try to anticipate what content is needed in processes related to those applications.”

It's good to see that Perceptive's CTO and VP of marketing are on the same page.

Autonomy-HP Deal Still on

At least according to this report, because it's an all-cash deal, it doesn't require shareholder approval. Says Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi, who is quoted in the link:  “While disastrous quarterly earnings from Autonomy in November could open the door for HP to claim a [material adverse change], we see the likelihood of successfully doing so – even under such as a scenario – as remote."

This article explains some of the confusion that Autonomy founder CEO Mike Lynch is facing. I'm not sure how to feel for Lynch in this scenario. If he owns 8% of the business as reported, he's getting something like $800 in cash in the buyout, but Meg Whitman running Autonomy - I'm not sure that's what he had in mind. Ousted CEO Leo Apotheker was a software guy at least, and clearly had some serious investment in making the Autonomy acquisition work. Whitman's only software credentials appear to me a mostly disastrous acquisition of Skype while at eBay.

Kofax , Top Image Land Large Census Contracts

Kofax landed theirs with the Indonesian Bureau of Statistics. It's a $1.9 million deal that includes Kofax Capture, VRS, and the KTM data capture modules. According to the press release, the implementation will be used to "process approximately 700 million documents used for statistical data collection from over 460 cities each year in the world’s fourth most populous country." (I didn't realize Indonesia had that large of a population. Jakarta, the capital, has almost 10 million people.) Also, to "scan and capture data from surveys, census forms and other statistics related documents and then export the images and data to an SAP system to be used as a repository and for access by employees."

TIS, which has worked on multiple census projects throughout the world over the past 10 years, recently landed the German Census. TIS' "eFLOW platform will be used  to digitally capture and process approximately 180 million questionnaire pages by seven statistical offices." Census projects that TIS has completed include Argentina 2011, Belarus 2010, Brazil 2000, Cyprus 2002, Czech Republic 2011, Hong Kong  2001 and 2006, India 2002 and 2011, Ireland 2002, 2006, and 2011, Italy 2002, Kenya 2000, Romania 2011, Scotland 2011, Slovak Republic 2001 and 2011, Slovenia 2006, South Africa 2001, South Africa  2007 and 2011, Thailand 2010, Turkey 1997 and 2000, and Vietnam 2009.

Dicom to distribute KnowledgeLake in EMEA

European-based value-added distributor Dicom has announced it will act as KnowledgeLake's distribution arm for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa territory. KnowldgeLake is a St. Louis-based ISV that has emerged as a market leader for adding document imaging to SharePoint deployments. KnowledgeLake has more than 1,500 customers using its software, but almost all of those are in North America. Dicom, the hardware distributor that spun off from Kofax earlier this year, adds KnowledgeLake to a growing portfolio of software products that also include Kofax Express, Kodak Capture Pro, and most recently,CaptureBites.

More on this in this week's premium edition.

The deal was announced at DMS, which is being held this week in Germany.

Laserfiche Offers to Trade-In Program

In the wake of HP's announcement that is acquirinig Autonomy, which owns the Interwoven and iManage document management software code and install base, Laserfiche has announced "a trade-in program designed to help customers of acquired enterprise content management (ECM) vendors easily and cost-effectively upgrade to a full-featured—and fully supported—Laserfiche ECM system."

Accoridng to a press release, "Laserfiche’s trade-in program allows new customers to receive credit for the value of their existing ECM systems when converting from a competitor’s product to Laserfiche." Not sure who is coming up with that "existing value," but it's a great idea by Laserfiche. It kind of sounds like the "Cash for Clunkers" Laserfiche was promoting a couple years ago in conjunction with the federal government's buying of old, gas-guzzling cars.

We've seen ISVs take a similar approach with VARs and offer to give their customers software for free if they can just switch their base over to the new vendor's maintenance program - and then also sign on for new software sales. We understand there is some of this going on in the capture market right now in fact.

Scan-to-Malware?

This isn't too cool: "E-mails claiming to come from a Xerox WorkCentre Pro photocopier have been spammed widely across the internet, containing a malicious file as an attachment."

Presumably, this is another reason you buy the third-party capture software rather than going with the bundled scanning app.

Copanion Acquired

Remember these guys? They basically leveraged the Tesseract OCR technology and some internal software development to create a SaaS for capturing images and data of/from forms related to tax returns. Companion is focused on the professional returns market, and we estimated it did about $3 million in business during the 2010 tax season (2009 returns.) Here's a story we did on Companion last year after meeting CEO Ed Jennings at Harvey Spencer's annual Capture Conference.

Jennings was targeting something like $10 million in annual revenue for this year's tax season. We're not sure how they made out, but we did find that the company was recently sold to Drake Software - "a leading tax preparation software vendor." Strategically, the deal makes a lot of sense.

According to the press release, the "aacquisition accelerates Drake's calculated move into the SaaS space." "GruntWorx [Copanion's product brand] allows us to rapidly expand our offerings into the cutting-edge document automation technology arena. This enables us to provide tax professionals with a true end-to-end paperless tax solution and deliver extremely high accuracy rates," said John Sapp, Vice President of Strategic Development at Drake Software.

"Cutting-edge document automation technology arena," -- Like that description.

Aapparently Drake is privately held, so we couldn't find any info about how much it paid for Copanion, but we reported last year that Copanion had raised at least $16 million in venture financing, including a $10.2 million round that closed just two years ago. So, we're guessing Drake paid at least $25 million. (Does anyone have any insights into a typical multiple paid for a company just two years after taking on such a large round of financing?) If that's the case, if certainly proves out the value of a vertical focus.

Kofax Signs $2.6 million Check Capture Deal

With the Brazilian subsidiary of one of its global banking customers.

From today's press release: "The Brazilian subsidiary will implement Kofax Capture, Kofax Transformation Modules and Kofax Monitor to automate and accelerate the processing of approximately 240 million checks it receives annually. The Kofax software will enable the customer to perform digital check scanning at the branch level, thereby removing the need to physically ship paper checks from branches to a central location for processing. Following the truncation process, the check images and data will be routed to the bank’s proprietary financial processing application."

Didn't know they were in that business, but it seems like a great deal for Kofax.

Also thought the news earlier this week was interesting that Kofax, "has entered into a new, three year $40 million revolving line of credit facility with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The credit facility replaces the company’s prior $16 million facility with another bank." It's no secret that in the wake of the sale of its hardware distribution business, Kofax has been interested in using it close to $100 million in the bank to make an acquisition.  You would think the new line of credit would further facilitate such a move. Stay tuned.

Document Boss on HP Acquisition of Autonomy

Thought they did a fairly good job on this:

Few highlights from it:

Price: "$10.3B, (HP's) largest technology acquisition to date. This reflects premium valuations of 8.3 x Revenue; 16.5x of EBITDA, and 26.8x of P/E, all based upon 2012 consensus estimates for Autonomy results. As a public company, this reflects an approximate 60% premium over today’s share price and, in excess of a 50% premium, over average share price in 2011."


Key Effects:
 
Valuations will continue to hold and increase in the (ECM) sector. Larger companies will continue to pay enhanced multiples for companies they truly desire. This fact will be positive for all sector companies as they pursue exit strategies."


"While consolidation persists, the sector will continue to expand! In every major deal, key people will leave. In many cases, they will eventually start new companies aimed at solving highly specific business problems. We see this trend continuing; perhaps a new “replace Autonomy” market will emerge."

Don't mean to plagerize, but I think they did a great job discussing some of the stuff related to this partifular move.