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.
Move over, machine learning, here come the deep learning algorithms. We predict that deep learning models will disrupt the status quo of document classification over the next 12 – 24 months, as customers discover that they can train an AI classifier with as few as five samples and deploy it in a matter of hours. Without the need for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or IBM, and without the traditional massive compute costs and data sets associated with Deep Learning to date. Time will tell if we are right or not, but change is on the horizon.
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.
We’ve been talking about multimedia data capture in ECM and BPM for at least 20 years. Recent advancements in computing power and deep learning, leveraged by innovative companies like AnyClip and Veritone, are finally moving into the information management mainstream. We expect to see this take off over the next 2-3 years.
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.
