2022 Innovation Index Award Winners
We are genuinely excited to announce the 2022 years Innovation Index Award winners. As in past years, it’s a truly eclectic bunch who, in their unique way, caught us by surprise and gave us a wow moment.
cognitive capture
6 New Reports – Nov 2022
Today we released yet another batch of research reports, Vendor Vignettes. These short reports are, in essence, a vendor product or service review.
Microsoft Syntex – How big a deal is this?
Was the recent Syntex announcement at Ignite 2022 the most significant Microsoft news drop since the launch of SharePoint in 2001?
Hooked on Classics
How can a mature, mid-size IDP classic player compete with the shiny new AI-first stories? Their AI pitches are threatened with oblivion, overwhelmed by the capital-infused buzz created by the flashy start-ups with those huge sales and marketing budgets.
Kofax buys Ephesoft: The Prodigal Son Returns.
With the explosion of new vendors and investment coming into IDP, we think the market will hardly notice the merger. There is so much new business now that IDP has become intelligent. The best is still ahead.
The IDP Industry’s First 100% Accuracy Claim: Truth or Hype?
Last week one press release made a claim that almost broke our skeptimeter. The headline claimed “industry-first 100% accuracy offering for document processing.”
5 Years of Deep Analysis & Market Shifts
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. …
When RPA Met BPM: Post-Acquisition News from Blue Prism
This was a bullish briefing from Blue Prism. SS&C paid $1.65 billion, so we expected nothing less than a moon shot effort. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding, as a lot of product integration promises were made and there is still much work to do here. It’s also hard to imagine that this is the last acquisition SS&C will make. Will the portfolio grow even further with a process intelligence/mining addition on the horizon?
Kofax Acquired – Again
So to nobody’s surprise, Kofax’s owners, Thoma Bravo, announced that it had sold the company to Clearlake Capital and TA Associates this past week. At the time, the asking price was circa $3B, and something a little north of that seems to have been the final sale price.
Front to Back at Appian World 2022
But beyond the expected announcements, Appian World was an interesting reflection on the pandemic years and its impact on IT and IT vendors. For Appian, this period has delivered a rocket-sized boost to their business growing around 20% year on year.
The Demise of the Content Services Magic Quadrant
Gartner has dropped its Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Content Services; it’s a big event in a relatively small world.
Info Management M&A Roundup March 2022
Every month or two, we do a quick round-up of the deals in the Information Management and Automation sector that caught our eyes. So much activity is a sign of health and strength in the industry.
Has Intelligent Document Processing crossed the chasm?
IDP (AI-powered document capture/OCR) is about to cross the venerable chasm and enter the main street of B2B purchasing. And the charge is being led not by the legacy IDP vendors, but by the upstarts.
Google & Document Capture?
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 …
M&A Roundup Dec 2021
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.
The grunt work of Digital Transformation just got easier
TWAIN Direct’s ultimate goal is connecting devices directly to the software app, completely removing the PC from the middle. That’s really important to the new wave of cloud developers; it abstracts the proprietary hardware layer and replaces all the other confusing scanner connectors. Plus it’s free to any developer.
Where is OpenText?
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).
July M&A Update – Our Thoughts
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
June Deals and Box – Our Thoughts
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.
WFH – KM & Tulsa OK
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.