Today there was important news in the Cognitive Capture market. ABBYY, a privately-held company, announced an investment from Marlin Equity Partners, which will make Marlin the largest shareholder. Terms of the investment were not revealed. Marlin is a global private equity firm that acquires businesses across diverse industries and has built a significant portfolio of software companies.
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.
We attended OpenText World Europe this April to learn where the ship is headed. OpenText made it very clear that it is staking its content management future on the cloud. The company announced Cloud Editions 21.2, an all-encompassing, all-in effort to achieve that long turn away from on-premise legacy software. Mark Barranchea, CEO, pledged an R&D investment of over $1 billion in R&D in their diverse stable of products. For a company with $3 billion in sales last year, that is a very impressive number.
However, in practice, following and indeed enforcing these principles is going to be a major challenge. The trend in AI today is to build black boxes and embrace Deep Learning though there is a performance and practical advantage to that, providing transparency is not part of the equation.
Under the hood, Vantage utilizes Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that are pre-trained on hundreds of thousands of documents to extract visual features from a document. A Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is used to extract semantic features of the text. While undoubtedly welcome to the large community of ABBYY users and the market at large, neither method is ground-breaking or particularly innovative.
Today Dropbox announced that it is to acquire San Francisco-based DocSend, a VC-backed startup that has been around since 2013 and raised a little over $15m in funding. DocSend is an interesting little firm with an innovative approach to tracking and securing external messages and documents.
This week Microsoft launched Viva, its employee experience platform, building on the foundational work of Project Cortex. Microsoft describes Viva as an organizing layer across 365 leveraging teams. Nothing too surprising there, but where it does get interesting is its ability to co-ordinate insights, alerts, and information across the enterprise.
But, here’s the thing, a couple of years ago, everyone was talking about AI, but few were doing it. This past year things changed fast; now, there is a mad rush to embrace AI or get left behind. But its easier said than done, AI tools, models, and libraries are readily available, but skills, knowledge of specific user needs, and good data are not.
Few saw the potential impact that RPA would have on the market, though many practice a form of revisionism to claim that they did. The fact is that most ‘experts’ saw RPA as a flash in the pan that would have little impact on a mature, stable, and lucrative BPM market. The experts were wrong; …
2021 is now just around the corner, and Information Management is in for a big year of change, disruption, progress, and innovation; that’s not a prediction, it’s a promise.
