If you want evidence of where things are going, French search giant Sinequa this week announced the launch of not one but four pre-trained deep learning language models for its platform. Four, not one – that is a vast amount of AI processing power.
It’s hard to believe that I founded Deep Analysis five years ago (almost to the day). It’s hard to believe we made it this far and that we are looking forward to the next five. But maybe what is hardest to grasp is just how much our industry has changed over these past few years. …
Specialized MSPs may be the answer, and to be clear, some, though not that many, already exist (particularly for Elasticsearch), but not many. And as advanced AI (think neural networks and Deep Learning) start to play a more significant role in these applications, one would hope more will become available.
At Deep Analysis, we undertake technical and market due diligence for Private Equity, Investment Banks, and Vendors looking to acquire. Hence we keep a close eye on what is happening in the broader Information Management and Enterprise Automation market. May, except for the massive Kofax deal (our analysis here), has been relatively quiet, but a few deals this month did catch our attention….
The Trump Organization has retained HaystackID to use its tools to trawl through its communications and files to meet the requirements of legal disputes running in New York. This week, Judge Arthur Engoren demanded more transparency and urgency from HaystackID.
egal tech appears to be ‘crossing the chasm’ to use a somewhat tired cliche. All in all, that is a good thing, but with that shift comes as many challenges as it does opportunities. We will be exploring many of these over the coming months, and we very much welcome any feedback (as long as it’s polite!).
The fixed-page concept seems like one that is near eternal, but just as the world of web content management moved from fixed pages to dynamic content delivery, so too is the back office moving in that direction. We will be publishing a more detailed study shortly, but for now, let’s just say ‘stuff’ may be about to hit the fan for some.
We spotted the first capture unicorn in the wild, and (spoiler alert) it’s not an AI-powered intelligent document processing (IDP) startup.
We thought it about time that we took a good look at Google Document AI; the household names foray into the world of Document Capture. Call it Cognitive Capture, Capture 2.0, or Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), this once sedate and glacially moving sector has taken off in the past few years at a rate that …
This will be the last of the year of these notes, but what a year it has been! From a macro perspective, this year has seen over $1,200 B in M&A activity; yes, I said $1,200 B, almost double 2020 and three times 2019’s spend. At a slightly more granular level, we should note that investors have seen a massive increase in tech investment in previously ignored regions. For example, in Latin America, VCs spent nearly $15B, compared to just $4.4B in 2019, and you can see a trend in plain sight. For all the real-world horror of the pandemic from both an individual and global perspective, the fact is that the COVID virus has accelerated mass digitization in almost every area of business. Be that to support remote working, remote healthcare, or remote banking. It’s not hyperbole to say that this past year has been revolutionary from a tech perspective, and its impact on the industry will reverberate for many years to come.
Our Enterprise Information and Automation Management sub-sector has also been busy this year. Still, I suspect the next 2 to 5 years will be even more active, accompanied by a changing of the guard. What I mean by that is that many well-established, aka legacy vendors, will be walloped. Goliaths like Google & Microsoft are moving into the enterprise mainstream, and a veritable army of innovative startups is thriving. Out with the old, in with the new. Not that the old will necessarily go away, rather their strength will diminish over time as new blood comes in to transform the sector. At Deep Analysis, we are excited about the changes coming and the opportunities for both enterprises and vendors alike. So much to look forward to in the coming year and beyond.
The year-end is always a time to closeout deals, and this year is no exception. Below is a list (though not comprehensive) of some that have caught our eye recently:
EFSS vendor FileCloud secured a $30m round of investment from Savant Growth
Governance vendor Gimmal also secured a new round of funding from Rubicon Technology Partners
Governance firm Workiva acquired AuditNet
Tableau acquired NLP vendor Narrative Science
Component Content Management vendor Orbis Technologies acquired Innovasys
ProTitle USA acquired document prep company DocSolution
MarkLogic acquired veteran search vendor Smartlogic
But the eye-catching deal of the year-end has to be Oracle’s eye-popping acquisitions of medical records company Cerner for $28.3B, the biggest deal Oracle has ever closed, and that’s saying something. Oracle has stated that it expects Cerner to deliver substantial additional revenue for years to come, and we don’t doubt that. If medical records were of value before COVID, they are now priceless. But if medical records alone are of immense value, imagine what a transformation of the medical industry through increased automation, document processing, and AI-driven analysis will be worth? Its unpalatable and a concept few outside of the US can grasp. Still, the management of US medical records is in desperate need of a digital transformation, one that will take many years to undertake but maybe finally on the cusp of happening.
The “cusp of change” could be our theme for 2022 as a whole. For all the talk of Digital Transformation, there has been little to see beyond upgrades and a few new bells and whistles. The last true era of Transformation was the late 90’s with the introduction of both the internet (birth of SaaS) and the massive rollout of heavyweight, high-cost ERP systems. But if the sudden disruption and enforced discretion of the workforce have taught us anything, it’s that we need to rethink, reimagine and reinvent the way we work. The technology from AI to Blockchain is ready and waiting to go, but it was always required a massive leap of faith or a hard push for many enterprises to change; many are now prepared, whether they like it or not, to make that jump.
