It is worth noting, that what OpenText is doing is in stark contrast to its nearest competitor Hyland (backed by PE firm Thoma Bravo). That has over the past couple of years acquired a blockchain startup (Learning Machine), an RPA vendor (Another Monday) along with open source DAM/ECM vendors (Nuxeo & Alfresco).
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.
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.
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.
Today SAP announced that it is to acquire process intelligence vendor Signavio for $1.2B. Considering Signavio’s revenues were around $100m, and it had raised almost $230m in funding, that’s a high price to pay. But is such a high price justified, and why would SAP contemplate paying so much in the first place?
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; …
Even though analysts need to label and sort enterprise technologies into neat silos, this practice has always been of limited value. As it often makes navigating a buyer toward the right product for their needs much harder than it should be.
The price has not been disclosed, but off the record, estimates tell me that TH Lee has made a tidy profit on their investment and that Hyland has not overpaid. However, as always, it is essential to note that no M&A transaction is without tears. Alfresco ran a long and steady race as an independent championing open source ECM
The RPA/DPA world is now righting itself. There’s a clear trend, as these three important process automation and/or content management vendors made RPA acquisitions in the past seven months, while showing how it can be done
