Prepping for ReadSoft User Conference, May 14-16

Looks like I'm heading down to this year's ReadSoft User Conference, May 14-16 New Orleans.. Should be a good, fun and productive event. I'm expecting to get an overview on ReadSoft's direction through a combination of attending the sessions, one-on-one interviews with ReadSoft executives and partners, and some good ole' Nawlins networking.

I visited the ReadSoft offices almost a year ago and came away with this overview of their basically two-pronged strategy: expanding their capture and P2P practices. It will be interesting to see how that strategy has evolved over the year, under the guidance of Andrew Pery, who was working for ReadSoft as a consultant when I visited last year, and was later named the company's first CMO.

ReadSoft is coming on an improved first quarter that included 27% YOY growth in software license sales and a 9% increase in overall revenue. ReadSoft's EBITDA was improved, but the ISV still lost money. According to President & CEO Per Åkerberg CEO, as quoted in the press release on the Q1 financials, "Our EBITDA result and our margins have taken clear s teps in the right direction....A gradual change in the reporting of our revenues from our support and maintenance agreements has affected this quarter’s result negatively compared to first quarter last year. This effect means no lost revenue but only a time delay in the reporting of these revenues."

AIIM 2014, Freakanomics, and Freddie Mercury

Just got back from enjoying three days at the AIIM Conference 2014 in Orlando. Yes, the weather was great - especially considering the winter/spring we had/are having up here in northwestern PA. But, as I predicted in my previous post, I ended up spending very little time outside enjoying the weather. Instead, my time was spent mostly indoors at the conference, enjoying great conversations, ideas, networking, sessions, and alright, I had a few beers.

I'll have full coverage of the event in my next premium issue of DIR, coming out next week, but I wanted to go over one thought I had, which was re-enforced by a podcast I happened to be listening to on the way home. That thought is that we in the technology industry often get way ahead of the end users. No, this is not anything strikingly new, but I think we all need a little reminding now and then.

For example, I attended a roundtable on high-volume scanner. Mark Brousseau (a former DIR editor many moons ago) was the host and, as always, he did a great job encouraging audience participation. In other words, he called people out and demanded to know why they were there. Anyhow, the biggest problem among the end users at the roundtable was manual sorting of documents. One user specifically complained about having to print and insert bar-coded separator sheets before scanning, even though they were licensing capture software from a vendor who has an auto-classification option. Heck, there are multiple auto-classification products on the market. I've seen the demos and they seem to work well enough, but as usual, in many cases the users seem to be too heads down with their operations to want to try anything new. Based on my experience covering capture technologies like OCR and IDR, I'm convinced that it's just a matter of time before auto-classification is widely adopted - it's just that that time is not here as fast as many vendors want it to be.

In addition, I heard more than one comment about the lack of technological savvy of many of the conference attendees. I think they may have felt they were talking over the attendees' heads-which they may have been. But, this is a good reality check. It helps everyone realize that the buyers are not as sophisticated as we often want them to be. After all, these attendees each spent probably a couple grand to come to the event, so they weren't there to fool around. They were looking for something - but maybe it wasn't quite the advanced something that many vendors were pitching - at least not yet. Remember, it takes an acorn to grow an oak.

Finally, all of this was re-enforced on my ride home when listening a recent Freakonomics podcast. It is titled "It's Fun to Smoke Marijuana,"and no , that's not the title of an old Cheech & Chong album (well, maybe it is too), but in this case it is referring to what is supposedly being said by Queen when you play their hit single "Another One Bites the Dust" backwards. Basically, if you don't know they are supposed to be saying that, it sounds like gibberish, but if you are listening for it, it's like how could you miss it?

The podcast is about how people's perspectives are skewed by their own knowledge. Because we know so much about advanced capture, we naturally think others should too. This podcast explains that this is not a character flaw - it's really just natural. Anyhow, just something to keep in mind when marketing to all those luddites out there.

Cheers.

Ralph

Heading to AIIM Conference 2014

Have a few minutes as I'm delayed in the Buffalo Airport for another hour it appears. Looking forward to heading down to Orlando for a few days of nice weather - even if I am going to be suffering from the eternal conference conundrum - you are stuck inside (at least) 90% of the time. But, nonetheless I'm certain the company will be good. I have a number of great appointments set up and am looking forward to catching up both on and off the record with multiple people and organizations.

There are also a lot of good conference tracks and roundtables on the agenda.

Free wi-fi in airports is a great development. I'm sitting here plugged in at one of those Southwest counters, working almost as efficiently as I would be at my home office (fingers crossed).

Speaking of hi-tech developments, I'm liking this AIIM app so far. From what I understand they are not going to have any paper agendas distributed at the event, so they are kind of forcing people to use the app. Seems to be working as there is certainly a good amount of activity on it. However, I just went through and tried to select my agenda and some of the events that were listed online seem to be missing in the app agenda. Need to figure this out, although I'll probably end up missing half the sessions I plan on hitting anyhow - as I get caught up in conversations.

Alright, plane is here. Should be boarding in a few minutes. Looking forward to seeing some of you in Orlando later today!

Scheduled for a root canal on Friday

Kofax, QAI, SPAs - Did They Help Fix Healthcare.gov?

This summer Kofax announced a $7M deal with a government agency that was among the biggest in company's history. It included more than $4M in software license revenue and $3.5M for four years of prepaid software maintenance. The deal was to a government agency and was sold through federally-focused Fulton, MD-based systems integrator and conversion services provider Quality Associates, Inc. (QAI).

At Kofax's recent Transform Conference, QAI was recognized by Kofax with its Award for Partner Deal of the Year. A few more details surrounding the customer came out. "The overall contract will help a government healthcare agency manage efforts related to enrolling uninsured citizens in state insurance exchanges, as mandated by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – millions of paper and electronic applications and other documentation are received, reviewed and verified for completeness and eligibility, and processed in an environment that protects applicants’ personal information."

QAI is presenting this as a First Mile implementation leveraging Kofax's Smart Process Application technology. Of course, this is exactly what I was calling for as I was going through my personal experience trying to sign up for a new healthcare plan at US Government Web site. At least it appears we are all on the same page now, which may have something to do with the sharp decrease in complaints we've heard recently about the onboarding process.

Who is TIS' latest Census Win?

Top Image Systems (TIS) has been a leader in the census capture market for a long time. Recently it was recognized "as an approved vendor for the UNPFA (United Nations Population Fund Agency), the organization responsible for the execution of censuses worldwide." TIS has followed that up with the announcement of a census win that will bring it more than $1M in revenue. This includes implementing a capture and document management system.

The project is for a country in EMEA with a population of more than 15 million. So, who could this be? According to the Web site NationsOnline, there are five EMEA countries that fall between the population figure of 15-20 million (there are five more between 20 and 22 million). Those five countries are:

(We'll guess the Netherlands, but that is just a guess:)

Cameroon

Central Africa

19,406,000

Romania

Eastern Europe

19,043,000

Netherlands

Western Europe

16,733,000

Niger

Western Africa

16,275,000

Burkina Faso

Western Africa

15,731,000

Kofax Transform 2014 Kicks-Off - A Brief Look at Kapow

I am out there in San Diego Kofax's annual user and partner conference. Things kicked off last night with a reception/partner product showcase. One of the goals of my trip out here was to get a better understanding of Kapow - the data integration software company that Kofax acquired last year. I had a fairly long discussion with a Kapow salesperson last night as well as a demo. Basically, he described the "technology as the glue that binds." In other words - here's the way I understand it at least - it has the ability, without API programming, to go into any application and extract requested data. This can include both internal and external sites. And it's a two-way integration, so, if the collected data comes back in a way that indicates some sort of action should be taken, the Kapow software can also execute that action by submitting new data. And the software is designed so that these integrations can be set up by business analysts, with help from IT staff only for certain customizations.

Here's a case study of how Audi used Kapow to create an internal portal. How it fits into the Kofax platform is that it should enable Kofax's capture and Altosoft data integration sofware to be integrated with an unlimited number of third-party applications - which should push forward Kofax's First Mile strategy. The First Mile of course was the big marketing strategy pushed forward last year under then CMO Martyn Christian at Transform. All indiciations are that Kofax plans to continue down that strategic line. I'm interested to see how today's presenatations and interviews play out.

Strong SaaS and Mobile Revenue Highlights TIS 'Q4/Year-End Financials

Some highlights from Top Image Systems 4th quarter/year-end 2013 financials that were announced today:

• Fourth quarter revenue of $8M, up from 7.35M for Q4 '12.
• Year-end revenue of $29M for '13, down from $31.3M in 2012
• In 2013, mobile technology revenue accounted for10% of total and exceeded forecasts in this area by 100%
• SaaS revenue for Q4 was $360,000

Michael Schrader, COO, from the press release, “In 2013 we have reinforced our transition strategy, investing significantly in cloud and mobility and expanding our hybrid business model to gradually grow our SaaS subscription-based operations while maintaining our existing on-premise business....Current investments in our cloud-based solutions will further promote SaaS sales. In 2013 we reinforced our mobile and cloud-directed product development strategy with powerful channel and technology partnerships, product launches, patent filings and key organizational changes to drive US market growth.  We are confident that our business model transition and clear focus on our cloud, SaaS and mobile solution strategies in 2013 will drive us to maximum revenue growth.”

I.R.I.S. Partners with Scytl to Create Document Imaging Systems for Elections

I.R.I.S. recently made an interesting announcement about a partnership with Scytl, which develops election management and voting systems. I.R.I.S., which is now owned by Canon Europe, is a developer of document imaging and automatic recognition/data extraction software. The companies recently got together and successfully completed election projects in Ecuador and Honduras.

From the press release, "Scytl looked for a company that could prove efficient extraction technology to complement their offering for the Ecuadorian elections 2013. The request encompassed supporting the election specific process where: the voting slips were gathered in the polling stations and grouped into reports. These were then scanned and processed in a decentralized scenario in 105 scanning centers. With I.R.I.S.’ advanced extraction technologies, Scytl was able to capture the election results from the reports automatically."

The reason this partnership interests me so much is because of what I, and several other people, consider to be security concerns associated with electronic voting systems installed in many states in the U.S.A. that don't produce any paper records. Due to my experience with document imaging, I don't understand why we don't utilize scanners, like Scytl is apparently doing with the help of I.R.I.S.' technology. A couple years, OMR technology was tried in the NYC area, but several glitches occurred. Perhaps Scytl, which seems to have successfully pulled off two Latin American elections with I.R.I.S.' help can bring its technology North.

TIS Names New VP, Americas

Top Image Systems continues to evolve. The long-time document capture ISV, which has recently expanded into mobile capture with a focus on the banking industry, has named a new Executive VP and GM for TIS Americas. Avi Mileguir joins TIS from Click Software where he ran U.S. West region and Mexican sales for the past several years. Click Software, which markets a cloud-based workforce management software.

"We believe Avi's leadership skills and successful sales experience in cloud-based offerings will enable us to reach our revenue goals and align resources between our previous separate American branches," said Michael Schrader, TIS Chief Operating Officer, in the press release.

With the appointment, TIS has combined its Latin American and North American operations. It is also relocating Oren Ilan, its current VP of Global Engineering and who has been with the company for 14 years, to the U.S. to lead professional services for the Americas.

Mileguir's appointment seems to build on two recent developments at TIS:

• The launch of the eFLOW 5 last year
• A large recent mobile capture sale in Brazil

Regarding eFLOW 5, here's what Schrader had to say about it when we interviewed him in September: "We changed our architecture from client/server to more of a full Web-based design. Our clients want to grow more and more into branch capture and scanning at the point of origin. In addition, we are sure businesses want to move more of their software into the cloud and SaaS and PaaS models. So, in general, it’s our goal to move all our software to a Web-based architecture and have it cloud ready." This meshes with Mileguir's cloud background.

The sale in Brazil was through a partner, Xerox, which will hopefully lead to more Latin American mobile imaging sales, so that meshes with Mileguir's Latin American sales experience.

Mileguir's appointment apparently displaces Omri Gelb, who had been managing TIS North American sales, most recently as GM of TIS' North American division.

Kofax Announces $4 Million TA & Analytics Deal

Today Kofax announced it had won a $4 million contract with a Western European-based "global wealth and asset management company." The deal includes Kofax's Total Agility 7.0 smart processing application (SPA) platform, as well as Kofax Analytics software (which is based on software from Altosoft, which Kofax acquired last year). It breaks down into $1.25M worth of software licenses and approximately $2.75M of maintenance, professional services, and training charges. The deal closed in Kofax Q2 (ended Dec. 31) and was delivered in January.

The software is being used to "capture, classify, process, act upon and analyze more than 20 million financial documents received from customers each year."

Certainly a solid deal for Kofax, especially because it includes two pieces of software that are separate from its legacy (as a capture ISV) and geared toward its future vision of serving the SPA market. That said, it's worth noting that software licenses made up less than one-third of the total price of the deal. Is this going to be the standard SPA sales model due to the complexity of the implementations? As a comparison to Kofax's legacy model, for the six months ended Dec. 31, software licenses made up about 40% of Kofax's total revenue with maintenance and professional services making up the remaining 60%. In that regard, the recent SPA deal doesn't seem like that big a departure from Kofax's traditional revenue model - although it's probably worth considering that the six-month period includes maintenance contracts related to more than 15 years of software sales, which should push that percentage higher than what you'd expect as related to a one-time deal. Do you know what I'm saying?

Anyhow, I guess it's natural that as Kofax moved into more complex SPA solutions its professional services revenue should rise - as in addition to more complexity, many professional services related to capture deals have historically been managed by resellers. It will be interesting to see how this affects Kofax's long-term profitability.

Investment Funds Manager Agrees to Buy BancTec

HandsOn3, which is described as "a Santa Monica, Calif., global manager of funds" has agreed to acquire BancTec. Based in Dallas, BancTec has been a long-time player in the document and check imaging hardware, software, and services space. Lately, it has tried to transition more of its business toward document outsourcing, which seems to have been the attraction for HandsOn3. HandsOn3 apparently already owns a BPO organization named Dataforce Group, "whose services include accounts receivable management, end-to-end auto insurance, and expense and benefits management."

The plan is to combine Banctec and Dataforce, which will create a $280 million company. It's worth noting that in 2011, the last year that BancTec filed an S-1 with the SEC, it alone was on target for more than $250 million in revenue. BancTec recently announced it had opened a new BPO center in El Paso to better handle its growing healthcare claims outsourcing practice.

According to the press release on the acquisition, "The current BancTec leadership and management team will remain in place and play a key role in the growth of the combined company."

BancTec executives are not discussing the acquisition until it is completed. In 2012 BancTec had an agreement to be acquired by document outsourcing and software specialist TransCentra, but the deal was never completed. BancTec is a sponsor at this year's AIIM Conference in early April and we are looking forward to catching up with them there.

Digitech Introduces New E-Forms, Upgrades Workflow

Digitech recently released a new version of its PaperVision Enterprise software, which includes new e-forms and improved workflow technology.  (Digitech's hosted ImageSilo offering is based on this platform.) These additions are designed to address the needs of Digitech's reseller channel, as well as end users, who previously had to rely on third party ISVs to provide this type of functionality.
 
Rebecca Wettemann, VP of Nucleus Research, had this to say about the new additions: “Many businesses have covered the basics of ECM and are now turning to additional options like workflow, electronic signatures, and e-forms to further boost the ROI from their technology investment,” she said. “Unfortunately, most have had to bolt together options from multiple vendors to get a complete solution. PaperVision Enterprise includes all three options as a seamless, fully-integrated suite, making it easier to share data between functions and easier to implement than a multi-vendor solution.”

Basically, with this latest release, Digitech is expanding the ECM capabilities it is offering its mid-market customers - a natural progression in any technology market.

Ease of use, network deployment highlight FineReader 12

(Article originally appeared in DIR 2/21/14 premium issue)

New network deployment capabilities, more accurate table extraction, improved efficiency features, and compatibility with Windows 8 are some of the highlights of ABBYY’s FineReader 12 OCR application, which was announced last week. “Our primary objective when we do a product refresh is to continue to increase accuracy,” said Angel Brown, director, product marketing for ABBYY’s OCR products. “We also want to add features that make the software easier to use.

“Also, while we’ve been making inroads with FineReader focusing primarily on the SOHO and SMB space, with the new release of our Corporate Edition, which has network installation capabilities, we expect to move deeper into the small enterprise and departmental level at large enterprises. End users now have the capability of rolling out systems for potentially thousands of users, and we will be offering volume licensing discounts. We’ve sold a lot of single user licenses over the years to organizations where we plan on going back and turning those into multi-user sites.”

FineReader 12 Corporate Edition starts at $399 to work with a dual core processor and $599 for a quad-core version. FineReader 12 Professional lists for $170. CDW, Ingram Micro, and the ABBYY direct store are the three most popular sales channels for the application.

Leveraging ABBYY’s ADRT (Adaptive Document Recognition Technology) IDR, FineReader 12 improves table recognition by up to 40%, which means users have to spend less time tweaking their results. Users can also save time by extracting items like tables and quotes without having to apply OCR to an entire document. Along those same lines, users can now extract text from single pages, while OCR processing of an entire document carries on in the background. 

Windows 8 compatibility means that the application can now leverage the latest PC touchscreen features. FineReader 12 Professional is available now, with the Corporate Edition due to become available next month.

For more information: http://bit.ly/FineReader12PR

ReadSoft 2013 Revenue Growth Flat; Recurring Revenue Percentage up 6%

ReadSoft announced its Q4 2013 and year-end numbers on Friday. Some highlights:

• 2013 revenue was $118 million, which was basically flat, when considered in local currencies, compared to 2012.
• License sales, when considered in local currencies, grew 1% to $38 million, or about a third of total revenue.
• Recurring revenue, which includes both maintenance and subscription software and hosted software sales grew to $55 million, or 47% of total sales, up from 40.4% in 2012.
• "U.S. and rest of the world" sales were basically flat in 2013 - at $35.5 million.

From CEO Per Åkerberg's comments:

•  The global roll-out of XBOUND during 2013 took longer than expected and consequently we didn’t reach our full sales potential for this area
• Although our 2013 results are not where we ought to be, we believe the investments we made and actions we took in acquisitions, employees, products and organization are essential to our long -term growth, results and margins
• It is very gratifying to see that all the hard work on increasing our recurring revenues is continuing to pay off. This will have a very positive impact on ReadSoft’s future profitability. Our cash flow from operating activities remains strong. 
• During the fourth quarter our markets in North America, Asia and South Africa have shown the way with good growth and profitability. 

TIS Announces P2P Deal with European Biopharma Company

One of Italy’s leading biopharmaceutical companies has selected Top Image Systems' eFLOW platform to  automate its P2P processes. This will include the capture of invoices, orders, contracts, and proof of delivery notes from thousands of suppliers at two locations in Italy. The eFLOW implementation will be integrated with the company's existing SAP and Microsoft SharePoint systems.

Read the full press release.

Perceptivce Lands $1.6M Invoice Processing Deal

Perceptive Software announced it has landed a $1.6 million invoice processing software contract with Doosan Infracore International. Doosan will implement Perceptive's Intelligent Capture (powered by Brainware), as well as Perceptive Content, which will manage workflow. Doosan is a Global 2000 company based in Seoul,  South Korea. It manufactures construction machinery. 

The Perceptive technology will be integrated with Doosan's Oracle and SAP systems. For the complete press release, click here.

“EDI provides a great deal of efficiency in reducing our paper volumes, but it will not work without a clean three-way match, and it’s simply not a feasible solution for our lower-volume vendors—which is to say, most of them,” said Jim Adkins, director of materials for Doosan. “Perceptive Software’s technology offers a great capability for keeping exceptions manageable, standardizing the workload for all territories and converting diverse paper documents to electronic data that is visible and processed with efficiency. We anticipate this project will remove a considerable amount of manual data entry from our routines, giving our staff more opportunities to pursue improvements for the shared services center.”

Large Mobile Capture Deals

Last week, we had Top Image Systems, in conjunction with its reseller partner Xerox Brazil, announce they had closed a deal for a 3,000 site mobile capture application involving the processing of contracts - presumably for mobile communications services. Today, Kofax announced it had landed a $1 million contract with a bank that is licensing its mobile capture technology. The bank is looking at deploying it an apps for check capture and deposit, bill paying, and new customer onboarding, and more.

These two deals are signs that the mobile capture market has evolved beyond checks and that mobile document capture is moving out of the planning and discussion stages and into the early real world adoption stage. This is also good news for vendors like Mitek and EMC, which also both recently launched new mobile capture initiatives. Mitek announced new bill paying app technology, while EMC launched the new Captiva Mobile Capture SDK-initially targeted at enabling its Captiva Capture customers to add mobile capture to their on-ramps.

Perceptive Software Shows Significant YOY Profit Improvement

From Lexmark's year-end/Q4 2013 report:

For 2013: Perceptive Software revenue was $224 million. Perceptive Software revenue, excluding acquisition-related adjustments of $16 million, was a record $239 million and grew 48% compared to 2012.

For Q4 2013: Perceptive Software revenue growth of 60% in quarter (70% non-GAAP, 15% organic growth), 43% in full year (48% non-GAAP).

From transcript of conference call (on SeekingAlpha.com):

"We delivered strong year-to-year improvement in Perceptive Software's profitability for the quarter and the year, and we expect continued Perceptive Software operating margin expansion in 2014 and beyond."

"Perceptive Software, delivered significant year-to-year improvement in profitability this quarter, up $9 million, driven by the 2 factors we've been focused on. First, we delivered solid Perceptive Software growth year-to-year, including good license revenue growth. Second, with the actions we started to take last year, we've been able to reduce Perceptive Software's organic cost and expense growth without negatively impacting revenue growth. And for the full year 2014, we expect to achieve double-digit software revenue growth and remain committed to delivering a positive and expanded software operating income margin."

FY2013:
"Perceptive Software had a slight operating loss of $2 million, an improvement of $23 million versus 2012. We expect continued substantial improvement in Perceptive Software operating income in 2014."

For 2014: "Perceptive will grow a bit faster than 15%, MPS a little less than that."

Spigraph Acquires Dicom-Initial Thoughts

In what is being billed as a merger of Europe's top two value-added distributors (VAD) in the document capture space, Spigraph has acquired Dicom. Spigraph, based in France was founded in 1997 and has been expanding rapidly in recent years after taking on some venture capital in 2011. Dicom, which was founded in 1991, acquired the ISV Kofax in 1999 and then was spun off by Kofax in 2011.

When we talked last year with Dicom executives last year in the wake of the appointment of former software executive Rudolf Gessinger as chairman, they positioned a then recent announcement of a partnership between Kofax and Spigraph as non-threatening to Dicom's business. The Dicom execs positioned ALOS (which had been acquired by Spigraph and expanded at VAD's presence significantly in Dicom stronghold's Switzerland and Germany) as primarily in the systems integration business and Spigraph as stronger as a VAD in geographical regions like France, where Dicom was not particularly strong.

This absence of overlap was reenforced in a quote from Joe Froning, CEO of Dicom International, which appeared in the recent press release announcing the merger with Spigraph, "Even though our two companies have been working on the same markets until now, the geographical and functional areas that have overlapped are minimal," he said. "This merger therefore represents a uniting of our respective forces."

Froning will stay with the company as Senior Vice President of Dicom/Spigraph Distribution.Wayne Davey, previously CEO of Spigraph, becomes CEO of the group. The group’s head office will be at Spigraph’s headquarters in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier.

The press release lists the combined company's turnover as €130 million, or approximately $175 million. In its final full fiscal year as part of Kofax (ended June 30, 2010), Kofax reported $125 million was generated from its hardware distribution business. When Spigraph acquired Swiss-German document imaging systems integration specialist ALOS in 2011, the combined entity's revenue was listed at over $65 million. So, there has apparently been erosion in revenue in the past couple years, which is not surprising considering the state of the scanner market today, which is how VADs have historically generated the majority of their revenue.

As prices and margins continue to drop on scanners and related service contracts, VADs, especially in more mature markets like North America and Western Europe, have had to look to new avenues to generate revenue. (Although VADs in emerging markets like the Middle East, such as Forefront Technologies seem to still be growing at a healthy rate.) Gessinger's software background is what made him attractive to the Dicom board, which brought him in. And, Spigraph, through its acquisition of ALOS, has a systems integration practice that helps further diversify that its offerings, which is a good thing.

Between the two organizations, Spigraph and Dicom will now cover a good portion of EMEA, including both mature and developing countries, with a single entity, that offers a combination of document capture-related hardware and software sales, support, and professional services. This variety and geographical infrastructure, along with the resources of a 400-person entity, should make the organization a more valuable asset to resellers and end users, as well as create more profits, than either company would be able achieve on its own.

DIR to Partner with Xamcor

You may have seen this press release that moved across the wire last week. From the article that appears in this week's premium DIR, "Xamcor [is] a leading M&A firm focused on the Information Management industry. DIR Editor Ralph Gammon will be providing content for the Xamcor Web site, including regular columns, executive interviews, and commentary on news releases.

"[I am] looking forward to helping Xamcor accomplish its mission of helping companies looking to be acquired receive maximum value for their entities, and, for those acquiring, finding good fits for their strategic plans. Xamcor was founded in 2012 by experienced ECM industry professionals Paul Carman and Harvey Spencer, along with Ike Fattal, who has a strong background in finance, deal structuring, and M&A."

I think that is all going to be fun, but, also check this out, which Xamcor apparently got with the issuing of the press release - yes, that's the Xamcor logo posted on a sign at Times Square. Cool.