It’s one thing to provide corporate access to video conferencing and messaging systems; it’s another challenge entirely to provide remote and tightly managed access to all the data and files those workers need to get their job done. Hence, over the next year, we can expect more deals in the digital workplace sector
July has now kicked off with a bang or punches, depending on your viewpoint. Box put its boxing gloves on and smacked back hard at activist investor Starboard (the link here is well worth a read!), and Dutch firm IPRO acquired veteran eDiscovery vendor ZyLAB.
But one area that seems to have garnered little attention is the gritty reality of the challenge of finding information, gaining and sharing knowledge, and make informed decisions. Endless Zoom meeting, just don’t cut it. We get by, we do the best we can, but for knowledge workers, in particular, there are serious and often unacknowledged challenges ahead.
You can read more about the arcane world of file migration in our recent report, but though this Analyst Note focuses on Box Shuttle, the fact is we are seeing a surge of interest across the board in moving files to the cloud. And that shift opens up a wide range of new opportunities and challenges for firms to adapt, and to innovate in ways they could not do while keeping files on-premises.
This past week, Utah-based NetDocuments ownership switched from Clearlake Capital Group to private equity firm Warburg Pincus, reportedly, for reportedly, over $1B documents. It’s an exciting move for NetDocuments, whom we know pretty well, for several reasons. Firstly, such a large deal will surprise many in the industry as NetDocuments, as the saying goes, flies beneath the radar.
But, this past week, fellow cloud file migration vendor, SeeUnity (based in Colorado), was acquired by Boston, based private equity-backed legal tech firm Anaqua.
This week two events caught our attention in the industry a board shuffle at RPA vendor Automation Anywhere and Gimmals latest of several acquisitions. Let’s start with the smaller of the two Gimmals acquisition of Sherpa Software.
All in all quite month of activity, but all of course, overshadowed by the UIPath IPO. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the enterprise automation market in the short and long term. Undoubtedly some of the money raised, possibly much of the money, will go toward multiple acquisitions.
The MyInvenio deal follows closely on the heels of IBM’s acquisition of Brazilian RPA vendor WDG and add’s yet more practical functionality to its growing Cloud Pak services. Despite IBM being one of the largest IT vendors, its work in moving advanced automation to the cloud has received less attention than one might expect.
My take was that this investment was a good move for Box. It provides longer-term stability and some protection against an activist investor who may well have wanted to control or flip the company. My interest is in the industry as a whole, buyers, users, and builders of technology.
